On the afternoon of September 11th, 2001, Cherríe Moraga began writing the foreword to the third edition of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. She writes:

...conditions of invasion, war and terrorism have existed for people of color in this hemisphere since the mistaken arrival of Columbus to our shores [...] In a very brutal way, all that has changed with the attacks of September 11 is the illusion that United States borders protect those who reside within them, an illusion seldom shared by this country's residents of color. (Moraga and Anzaldúa: 2002: p. xv)

Moraga underscores, as do other authors in the text, the lack of protection and sense of belonging to a national cultural identity felt by peoples of colour within the United States. The text, written by women of colour and first published in 1981, was among the first to challenge the notion of a singular national cultural identity and the exclusion of women of colour from white feminist thought. As anthropologist Ruth Behar states, "This Bridge was a product of the most severe and painful crisis the North American feminist movement had ever faced — its need to come to terms with the fact that Other Women had been excluded" (Behar and Gordon: 1995: p.6).

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the writing of three "women of colour" whose work reveals and challenges exclusion from the mainstream's representation of a national cultural identity. These women, therefore, deal with a double or triple exclusion, not only because of their gender but also because of their race and culture. For them, I will argue, writing becomes an empowering vehicle that reveals the fissures in the cultural, social, and economic order in the United States. In order to discuss the ways in which writing can be potentially subversive — by challenging racism and sexism and dealing with identity and difference — I will look at the work of Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa, co-editor of This Bridge and author of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza; the work of Cuban-American performance artist Coco Fusco; and of Jewish-Cuban anthropologist Ruth Behar. For the purpose of the discussion, I have chosen these three women because being from a Spanish speaking background they are a racial, cultural and linguistic minority living in a country whose assimilation policies has forced them to negotiate cultural identity, and to seek to change misrepresentations of their culture through their writing and in their professions.

El movimiento

To introduce Anzaldúa's work, it is necessary to contextualise it within the Chicano Movement. Although it emerged as such in 1965 in an effort to unionise California farm workers (Ybarra-Frausto: 1995: p. 165), El Movimiento is embedded in the history of the struggle for recognition and autonomy of Mexicans and their descendants since the traumatic annexation, in 1848, of Texas, California, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona into a system that defended the rhetoric of democracy while practising unrelenting hostility towards them. The movement's origins can be traced to the nineteenth century, to what Chicano scholar Genaro Padilla calls a "collective utterance" (1994: p. 309) — silenced by the new regime — but which survives in the written testimonies from this era. These testimonies reveal the long history of the Chicano struggle, one which goes back well beyond the 1960's.

In his study on nineteenth century Mexican-American autobiography, Padilla remarks:

The rupture of everyday life experienced by some seventy-five thousand people who inhabited the far northern provinces of Mexico in 1846 opened a terrain of discursive necessity in which fear and resentment found language in speeches and official documents warning fellow citizens to accommodate themselves to the new regime or at least to remain quiet lest they be hurt or killed outright [...] in personal correspondence where anger and confusion were voiced to intimates; in poetry, corridos (ballads), and chistes (jokes) which made los americanos the subject of ironic humor, linguistic derogation, social villainy; and in Spanish-language newspaper editorials and essays that argued for justice and equality for Mexican-Americans in the new regime. (1994: p. 305)

In addition, Padilla notes, more than one hundred personal narratives of nineteenth-century Mexican Californians were commissioned and used by Anglo historians as supplemental material and quite intentionally not published (p. 309). It is to this tradition of writing that Chicano scholar, Francisco Lomelí, refers when he claims that Chicano literature has a long history and evolution (2002: p. 66). Stigmatised for being the creation of a "conquered people", this literature was ignored by both American and Mexican literary canons; "In the United States, giving credence to a body of works written in Spanish did not suit well with the homogenizing trends of the nineteenth century" (Lomelí: 2002: p. 66).

In the 1960's and 70's, the Chicano movement surfaces as a political and cultural struggle, in the words of novelist Tomas Rivera, "to represent, and to conserve that aspect of life that the Mexican American holds as his [sic] own and at the same time destroy the invention by others of his [sic] own life. That is — conservation, struggle and invention".[1] Chicano artists and writers contest the hegemonic culture's representation of Mexicans and Chicanos as lazy, drug using, gangsters threatening a monocultural society. They subvert these images by revealing other non-stereotypical ways in which the Chicano people exist and by entering academia and writing the Other history, their long occluded history. El Movimiento proclaims that America is not a country but an entire continent and it recognises its connections with other struggles such as the Civil Rights Movement, as well as international students movements and liberation struggles throughout the Third World.

Such movements challenged US policies of assimilation, the obsolete notion of the "melting pot", and shattered the mainstream notion of a dominant culture, a myth that, according to Mexican-American performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, exists only "in the virtual space of the mainstream media and in the ideologically and aesthetically controlled spaces of the monocultural institutions" (1995: p. 184). These institutions have had to open up spaces for groups which have been traditionally marginalised, among which are the Chicana and the Latina. Therefore, the Chicano movement gives a valid context within the United States to the struggles of Chicanas and Latinas, among which are the three women discussed here. The significance of these three writers lies in the fact that they contest the "mainstream's" stereotypical representations of them and their culture, using the powerful tool of writing to conserve, struggle and invent that which has been traditionally denied them — their own cultural identity.

Border woman

In This Bridge, Gloria Anzaldúa wrote a letter to Third World women writers in which she remarked:

Writing is the most daring thing that I have ever done and the most dangerous [...] Writing is dangerous because we are afraid of what the writing reveals: the fears, the angers, the strengths of a woman under a triple or quadruple oppression. Yet in that very act lies our survival because a woman who writes has power. And a woman with power is feared. (Moraga and Anzaldúa: 2002: p. 190)

The Third World women to whom the author refers are not just her sisters south of the Rio Grande, but those marginalised women within the United States. As seen in this quotation, writing is, for the author, a powerful liberating tool that reveals the oppression of such women but also their strength in coping with and resisting oppression. By accessing the written word women can also attain liberation from a purely domestic existence and can enter the domain of the public, the academia, a domain traditionally limited to the male. Hence it follows that a woman who has access to writing has power and a woman with power is a danger to the established order of society.

The realization of the power of writing came to Anzaldúa in early childhood when she heard the story of her grandmother's struggle to keep her land once her husband had died. Using the narrative voice of the oppressor, her poem "We Call Them Greasers", illustrates how easily the Mexican-American people were robbed of their land:

I showed 'em a piece of paper with some writing
tole 'em they owed taxes
had to pay right away or be gone by mañana.
By the time me and my men had waved
that same piece of paper to all the families
it was all frayed at the ends.[2] (p. 134)

For the farmers who could not speak or read English, the piece of paper was a symbol of power, a power they could not access. That piece of paper, with some writing on it, had the power to deterritorialise them, to leave them landless and powerless. Because she was aware of the power she would acquire to help her family and her people, the author, born in Texas in 1942 to parents who were sharecroppers and field-workers, struggled to make time for an education while at the same time working the family fields.

Anzaldúa first gained attention and fame as a writer with Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, a hybrid text not only because of its genre, since it incorporates autobiographical and historical writing, as well as poetry, songs and prayers, but also because of its use of language. She purposefully chose to break with the mainstream's notion of grammatical purity in the text, by incorporating a variety of languages which exist outside standard English and Spanish: "the language of the Borderlands", as she calls it, also includes "working class and slang English", "North Mexican Spanish dialect", "Chicano Spanish", and "Tex-Mex" or Spanglish (pp. 55-56).

Anzaldúa rebels linguistically because her experience with language has been traumatic. When she spoke Spanish during recess at school she was punished with a ruler and at university all Chicano students were required to take speech classes to get rid of their accents. Conversely, when she spoke English, some Latinos accused her of speaking the oppressor's language and mutilating Spanish. She therefore, asks:

For a people who are neither Spanish nor live in a country in which Spanish is the first language; for a people who live in a country in which English is the reigning tongue but who are not Anglo; for a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castillian) Spanish nor standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language? (p. 5)

Anzaldúa defends this "linguistic mestisaje" as a creative element born of the need for a language by a people who were robbed of one; a people who were no longer allowed to speak their ancestors' language, but who could not identify with English either. Their cultural expressions — the corrido, norteña music, tamales, and tortillas — could not be translated into English. In addition to this, with her use of language the author sought, as did many Chicana/Chicano writers and artists, to blur the distinction between a 'fine art' that was highly valued by the hegemonic culture and 'folk art', the expression of popular culture, traditionally seen as inferior. Hence the hybridity of her text, the readers' inability to place Borderlands in a distinct genre or a distinct language, adds to the purpose of her work.

As well as being denied a language, the Chicano people, in official history, had also been denied a homeland as though they had appeared in the United States in a massive migration in the twentieth century. Because of this homelessness they identify Aztlán, what is now the US Southwest, as the Chicano homeland. Borderlands/La Frontera begins with a historical account of Aztlán, and of the migrations of its inhabitants from pre-Columbian times to the present. Mixing autobiographical information, Anzaldúa narrates a history that has been occluded and misrepresented in the official texts. To her, the borderland is a "1,950 mile-long open wound" (p. 2) which divides her people. She writes:

A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead. (p. 3)

The author not only refers to the borderline — la frontera — that "protects" the United States from its poor neighbour, she is also describing the borders and margins to which her people have been pushed even though they live within the boundaries of such a powerful country. These borderlands convert her marginalised people into the underdogs of the hegemonic society. Anzaldúa too, inhabits this border culture; this in-between space for the Chicano is neither Anglo nor Mexican. Her concept of the borderland opens up this hybrid space for the Chicano to inhabit, but it also opens it up for all hybrids, for all those people of colour who inhabit the borderlands, including Negroes, Native Americans, Asians, women and homosexuals.

Anzaldúa is painfully aware of her culture's flaws when she remembers the "racial amnesia" suffered by Chicano's vis-a-vis the Negro and the Native American (p. 83). She also denounces her culture's machismo; the way it cripples its women (p. 21), and its homophobia. She, therefore, identifies Chicano culture with the mother, the Indian half, rather than the father, the Spanish half of mestiza identity. She describes the three archetypical mothers of Chicano culture: Malintzin, Guadalupe and la Llorona. First, Malintzin, or "la Chingada" (literally the fucked one), is the raped mother abandoned by her people and accused of betraying them by helping the Spaniards and marrying Cortez (p. 22). The Virgin of Guadalupe is a hybrid icon whose Indian name is Coatlalopeuh, descendant of the Serpent Goddess Coatlicue and of Tonantsi (p. 27), and appropriated by the Roman Catholic Church to subjugate the Indians. Guadalupe is the most powerful religious image of Chicanos and Mexicans, as well as being Patron Saint of the Americas. Finally, la Llorona is the mother who seeks her lost children and is a combination of the other two (p. 30). Nevertheless, according to the author, "the true identity of all three has been subverted — Guadalupe to make us docile and enduring, la Chingada to make us ashamed of our Indian side, and la Llorona to make us long-suffering people" (p. 31). It is this true identity of the three mothers, and the hybrid identity of the Chicano people that the author seeks to translate in Borderlands/La Frontera:

What I want is an accounting with all three cultures — white, Mexican, Indian. I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture — una cultura mestiza — with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture. (p. 22)

Anzaldúa's choice of words describes very well her unwillingness to be passive, powerless, without language, and without homeland. She will take her destiny, and her identity, into her own hands; she will carve, chisel and create it, like the phoenix, from her ashes and her entrails. She will create her own idols and give her own meanings — conserve, struggle and invent. For this purpose, she exhorts Chicanas to "a new mestiza consciousness", "a consciousness of the Borderlands", a consciousness of their hybridity as well as of the history and of the political depth of Chicana/Chicano oppression and struggle.

Cultural translator

When Anzaldúa's brother was reported missing in action, during the Vietnam War, her mother prayed to Guadalupe and promised to crawl on her knees and light novenas in her honour if he returned alive (p. 30). In 1984, one of Coco Fusco's brothers also went to war and died in Honduras. The United States military recruited Chicano and Latino boys, among other marginalised groups — Native, African, and Chinese American — to fight its dirty wars without giving their peoples an equal status in society. Because she lost a brother fighting the "red menace" in Nicaragua, Fusco writes:

Tragedies such as this we could survive, but never forget [...] It shook me to the bone to face my participation in the cynical game that used affirmative-action success stories as window dressing while turning the less fortunate into cannon fodder [...] I decided that I wanted to make sense out of the clashes between cultures that cause so many of us so much trouble and pain, but I chose to do so within the realm of art [...] I ceded to the impulse to become the kind of cultural translator that life seemed to be preparing me for.[3] (p. x)

In Anzaldúa's poetic imagery the new mestiza learns to juggle cultures (p. 79) and to speak like a serpent with a forked tongue (p. 55). Coco Fusco, on the other hand, uses the image of "cultural translator"; an image which can be represented by one of her performance characters, "La Authentic Santera".[4] Fusco portrays the santera, a witch who can participate in both worlds and can also translate them.

Born in New York City in 1960, Fusco recalls the struggle of her Cuban immigrant parents to find a school for her and her brother where they wouldn't be harassed for being mulattoes (p. vii), for not being white. Upon arrival in the United States, her parents searched for a place to live where they would not be stigmatised because of their skin colour. Before Fusco's birth, one of the places they tried was upstate New York:

...no one there ate garlic or onions and [...] the people didn't care about other places. They thought all foreign films were pornographic, the kids were ruder than we were, and they didn't even wash their sneakers. That was the North, but we could also forget about the South. One of the first news stories my mother heard when she arrived in the United States was about Emmet Till. We couldn't even think of traveling to a place where black boys got lynched for whistling at white ladies [...] Behind the walls of our home, walls that shielded us from that America, we made a world where people and things from all different kinds of places met. (p. viii)

Garlic and onions represented a cultural heritage which added to the stigmatisation, the smell being too strong for an Anglo society that doesn't care about other places, that thinks those Other places are primitive and inhabited by savages. Fusco also recalls how her mother hid from real estate agents in New York City so that they could live in a good neighbourhood and not in the barrios or ghettos where all immigrants lived (p. viii). Her parents attempted to protect their children from the prejudice that other children of immigrants faced; "They pumped our egos like crazy to give us a defence against the idiocies of a racist world", she recalls (p. vii).

Fusco has written extensively on performance art, cultural theory and representation and her performances and curatorial projects, beginning in the late 80's, span the decade of the nineties. Since she ceded to the impulse of becoming a "cultural translator", she works in the realm of performance art because, as she explains:

...performance has historically been and continues to be about the unconscious, both individual and collective. It is about how meanings are generated in the moment, out of interactions between individuals and between cultures. It is as much concerned with what we can control about our identities as what we cannot. This territory of multiple perceptions, and of the unpredictable, is a perfect place from which to continue to test the limits of the promise of democracy and tolerance: great ideas to which this country aspires, but which it has such tremendous difficulties actually living up to.[5]

Through performance art, as well as through her writing, Fusco can translate the meanings and perceptions that occur between marginalised cultures and hegemonic society. Through this medium she can also interrogate and represent that which she can and cannot control about her cultural identity. Because of this belief in such a powerful tool, Fusco collaborated, in 1992, with Guillermo Gómez-Peña on a work entitled "Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit..." which was part of a counter-quincentenary, interdisciplinary arts project that investigated and interpreted the history of representations of the so-called "discovery" of America.[6]

For the performance Fusco and Gómez-Peña appeared in a cage as two undiscovered Indians from an island in the Gulf of Mexico called Guatinau. The two Guatinauis appeared dressed in Indian costume with feathers, "Converse sneakers" (a very popular brand of running shoes in the United States), sunglasses, a laptop computer and a television in the cage. They were hand-fed sandwiches and bananas and taken to the bathroom on leashes by the cage guards. The "guards" would also speak to the visitors and answer questions since the Guatinauis could not understand them. For a small fee, the male specimen would tell authentic Amerindian stories and the woman would dance to rap music or they would pose for Polaroids with visitors. A simulated encyclopaedia entry, next to the cage, explained the ethnographic details of the Guatinauis and provided a fake map of the Gulf of Mexico showing the location of the island.

Another didactic display that was part of the performance showed the chronology[7] of the history of human exhibitions of non-Western peoples starting with the Arawak Indians that Columbus took to the Spanish court and including Australian Aborigines, Native Americans, indigenous peoples from the rest of the American continent as well as from Africa. Most of these humans were obviously exhibited against their will. In modern versions of the display, however, at least the partial consent of those on exhibit is necessary so that tourist industries and cultural ministries around the world can perpetrate the illusion of authenticity to cater to the Western fascination with the exotic Other. Fusco notes:

Designed to provide opportunities for aesthetic contemplation, scientific analysis, and entertainment for Europeans and North Americans, these exhibits were a critical component of a burgeoning mass culture whose development coincided with the growth of urban centers and populations, European colonialism, and American expansionism. (p. 40)

Thus, "Two Undiscovered Amerindians" was a critique of the once popular European and North American practice of exhibiting indigenous people from Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas in zoos, parks, museums, and circuses, a practice which reached its height with that of nineteenth-century Imperialism.[8]

"Our cage became the metaphor for our condition, linking the racism implicit in ethnographic paradigms of discovery with the exoticizing rhetoric of `world beat' multiculturalism" (p. 39), remarks Fusco whose critique of the ethnographic display and the commodification of ethnicity revealed two paradoxical realities:

1) a substantial portion of the public believed that our fictional identities were real ones; and 2) a substantial number of intellectuals, artists, and cultural bureaucrats sought to deflect attention from the substance of our experiment to the "moral implications" of our dissimulation, or in their words, our "misinforming the public" about who we were. The literalism implicit in the interpretation of our work by individuals representing the "public interest" bespoke their investment in positivist notions of "truth" and depoliticized, ahistorical notions of "civilization". (p. 38)

Consequently, Fusco acknowledges the problems implicit in the effort of the `cultural translator'; the part of the public which believed that this fiction was real completely missed the critique which the performance sought and quite contrarily fed into the exoticisation of the two savages. On the other hand, those who understood the fabrication also missed the point because they concentrated on criticising it for its lack of "truth" instead of realising that it was just a satirical commentary. Although, Fusco knows that performance — territory of multiple perceptions and of the unpredictable — can also generate things which she cannot control, it continues to be, nevertheless, her chosen medium to critique the hegemonic monocultural society whose limits she seeks to explore with her art.

Translated woman

Like Fusco, Ruth Behar also chose a discipline, in this case anthropology, to make sense of what she calls `the puzzle of her identity' (p. 216).[9] For this reason, her writing is concerned with the issues of displacement, the Cuban Diaspora, the Jewish Diaspora and border crossing. Behar's writing, even when related to her anthropological work, is a highly personal ethnographical and artistic expression that seeks to translate the puzzle of a hybrid identity, that seeks to challenge "the language of cultural authenticity and racial purity" (p. 212). The anthropologist turns the ethnographic eye on to herself and her family and deals with the experience of migration and identity and with emotions of loss, mourning and the search for home.

In an essay entitled "Juban América", Behar, who was born in Cuba, writes about her Jewish family's loss of a homeland and a language:

Spanish was not my grandfather's "mother tongue." He was a stepson of the language, yet he claimed it as his own. He spoke Spanish to his children and grandchildren; the Yiddish that he spoke with my grandmother and others of their generation failed to get passed on, while English, learned in a second exile, never entered his veins. My relationship with my grandfather, a man of the Jewish European Old World, was lived entirely in Spanish. (p. 203)

Escaping persecution and unable to migrate to the United States because of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1924, which limited Eastern European migration, Behar's grandparents arrived in Cuba searching for a homeland and learning a new language (p. 204).[10] Established in a small town in Cuba, her mother's side of the family became known as los polacos (the Poles) while her father's side, established in Havana, became los turcos, from Turkish Sephardic background and which spoke Ladino, the old Spanish of the expelled Jews (pp. 209-210). Both languages, the Ladino and the Yiddish, were lost in the following generation, especially upon the family's second exile to the United States after the Cuban Revolution.

Behar highlights the irony of her family's migration to the United States, a country that did not want them when they were migrating as Eastern European Jews and which now sought them as Cuban exiles, "as one of the human spoils of the victory of U.S. capitalism over impudent Cuban socialism" (p. 207). Nevertheless, this did not save them from experiencing the prejudice that other Latino immigrants feel. Describing her mother's situation as the only Latina in an office of white and black American female co-workers, she explains:

It doesn't help her much that she's white and Jewish because a white Jewish woman in America doesn't usually speak the kind of "broken English" that Latinas and Latinos speak. Her accent and her ongoing struggle with the English language are an ever present reminder that she is an immigrant in an America that is not hers, that she is "originally" from "elsewhere." She realizes she's being "othered" all the time, and she notices how the black women in the office get the same treatment. And so, as she tells me, "I'm with them, with the women of color." And I say to her, "Ma, don't you see? Here you are a woman of color too." (pp. 211-212)

The paradoxes are evident; her mother, though visibly white, becomes a woman of colour because she cannot speak the language correctly. Her father, on the other hand, works for third-generation American Ashkenazi Jews who drive Jaguars and who, Behar notes, "are nice enough to my father, but he knows he's not one of the boys" (p. 213). Though also Jewish, he cannot fully belong to the group because he lacks racial purity; he is just a Cuban who "happens" to be Jewish, or a "Juban." Behar uses the word "Juban" to denote a sense of the mestizaje of her people, which are to her a "translated people" (p. 215-216) capable of the bicultural fluency necessary to translate Creole language.

While Behar's grandfather did not learn English because the language "never entered his veins", her parents were forced to learn it even if they could only manage a "broken English". For Behar, on the other hand, the awareness of the power of language, and of being able to write it — what she calls "the currency of power in the academic world" (Behar & Gordon: 1995: p.66) — is as evident as in Anzaldúa. Behar refers to herself as "a woman who speaks with a forked tongue, a woman whose English is haunted by Spanish"[11] in the same way as her grandfather's Spanish was haunted by Yiddish (p. 203).

Not only is her language affected by her cultural background but her relationship to the written word is also plagued the limitations forced on her because of her gender:

When a woman sits down to write, all eyes are on her. The woman who is turning others into the object of her gaze is herself already an object of the gaze. Woman, the original Other, is always being looked at and looked over. A woman sees herself being seen. Clutching her pencil, she wonders how "the discipline" will view the writing she wants to do. Will it be seen as too derivative of male work? Or too feminine? Too safe? Or too risky? Too serious? Or not serious enough? (Behar & Gordon: 1995: p. 2)

Here the author agrees with Anzaldúa in that writing can be dangerous for a woman because it exposes her, makes her vulnerable, and insecure about the quality of her writing compared always to the male dominated "discipline". Nevertheless, the awareness of this risk does not stop her; Behar chooses to write and she does so in her father's name, in her Sephardic maiden name, which she keeps despite being married. In another essay appropriatly entitled, "Writing in My Father's Name: A Diary of Translated Woman's First Year",[12] she writes about her expulsion from home because her father cannot understand or forgive her for placing the family in the public gaze through her writing; she is chastised for writing about the family past, for violating a sacred law, dirty laundry gets washed at home. The daughter of immigrants chooses to write about the family past because it is her way of thanking them for their sacrifice and investment in her and because through writing about her parents she is trying to mark the distance she has travelled, the distance that separates her from them (Behar & Gordon: 1995: p. 72).

Besides her anthropological work and her writing, Behar has also ventured into filmmaking, directing and producing Adio Kerida/Goodbye Dear Love: A Cuban Sephardic Journey, a personal documentary about the search for identity and history among Sephardic Jews in Cuba, Miami and New York. Concurring with Behar's writing topics, the film highlights themes of expulsion, departure and exile, important components in the Sephardic legacy. In this sense, her film as well as her writing becomes a desire for reconciliation with the fatherland, Cuba, as well as with her father and her home. She writes:

Immigrants succeed through their children; they sacrifice, they invest, so their children will succeed. And the immigrant daughter, who worries about surpassing her parents, keeps trying to include them in her work, to throw a raft their way, so they can sail together on the choppy seas of the academy. (Behar & Gordon: 1995: p. 72)

Her effort in legitimating this experience and in writing their story of exile, in mixing the field with her life, causes problems for the anthropologist, not only at home but with academia as well. A review of her text Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story, celebrates her ethnography while condemning her last chapter because of its autobiographical content; it is too personal, too feminine and not serious enough for academia. The book review explains that the lives of anthropologists are rarely as rich and fascinating as those of their subjects. Behar replies "It doesn't matter if my life is boring, if I'm not sufficiently exotic Other. By the end of the month, just by virtue of a New York Times review, the book sells out" (Behar & Gordon: 1995: p. 78). In the criticised chapter, Behar describes how she attained the privilege of writing down the story of another, less privileged woman's life, Esperanza Hernández, a peddler in Mexico. Despite her autobiographical attempts at explaining away this privilege, she cannot forget that she owes Esperanza and that, no matter what, she will always have more money than her (Behar & Gordon: 1995: p. 80). Behar can only acknowledge her naïveté about the way the academy commodifies and exoticises people and her fears that, through her book, she too is commodifying Esperanza's story (p. 80).

Conclusion

The three women discussed in this paper inhabit the borders of a hegemonic patriarchal society from which they have attempted to challenge diverse forms of exclusion within the space of writing, art and academic knowledge. They have done so by endeavoring to create and translate a hybrid language that would allow them to interrogate and to try to subvert the hegemonic orders that have kept women, migrants, Blacks, homosexuals and others in marginal spaces. Through their academic and artistic work, they have also questioned the idea of a monocultural society as well as gender and racial blindness. To conclude, I will use an idea from one of Fusco's essays entitled, "El Diario De Miranda/Miranda's Diary" which appropriates the character of Miranda from Shakespeare's Tempest to empower feminine writing and the feminine search for identity. Fusco states:

It would seem, then, that the knowledge Miranda gains in her symbolic loss of a father figure is too dangerous for her to have — it makes her too independent, or too vulnerable, depending on whose perspective one takes. It was traveling to another place that allowed the original Miranda to understand her identity as different from the fiction that had been propagated by her symbolic father. The Mirandas of the present, myself among them, continue to undertake these journeys, straying far from the fictions of identity imparted to us by our symbolic fathers.[13]

Both Anzaldúa and Behar share this journey with Fusco. These three `border women' have travelled and crossed borders in search of their cultural Identity. All three have translated themselves between a language spoken at home and one spoken outside the home, between one spoken by their generation and one spoken by their parents' and grandparents' generation. Finally, all three have attempted to challenge the notions of a monolithic identity that the dominant culture, the symbolic father, the patriarchy, has imparted to them.

Notes

[1] Quoted in Ybarra-Frausto, p. 166.

[2] Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). All quotations are taken from this edition and indicated in the text by page reference.

[3] Coco Fusco, English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York City: The New Press, 1995). All quotations are taken from this edition and indicated in the text by page reference.

[4] A photo of "La Authentic Santera" appears in English is Broken Here, p. 170.

[5] In Fusco, "Performance and the Power of the Popular", pp. 174-175.

[6] "Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit..." was presented at the Edge Arts Festival in London and Madrid, the Smithsonian Institution, the Sydney Biennale, the Whitney Biennal, and the Fundacion Banco Patricios in Buenos Aires, among other sites. See English is Broken Here, pp. 37-63, for more information on the performance.

[7] The chronological list also appears in English is Broken Here, pp. 41-43.

[8] Among the most important sites for the exhibition of indigenous peoples in the Western world were the world fairs. See Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) and also Robert Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Exhibitions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

[9] Ruth Behar, "Juban América", in Stephen A. Sadow (ed), King David's Harp: Autobiographical Essays by Jewish Latin American Writers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999). All quotations are taken from this edition and indicated in the text by page reference.

[10] For information on the Jewish migration to Latin America see Judith Laikin Elkin, The Jews of the Latin American Republics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

[11] See Behar, Everything I kept: Poems in Prose/Todo lo que guardé: Poemas en prosa, online.

[12] In Behar and Gordon, Women Writing Culture, pp. 65-82.

[13] In Fusco, English is Broken Here, pp. 6-7.

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Luz Mercedes Hincapié was born in Colombia and migrated to the US where she graduated with honours in Intercultural Studies at Simon's Rock of Bard College with a thesis describing the migration(s) of her family. Luz has recently finished an MA in Post-Colonial Literature at the University of Wollongong with her thesis, Immigrant, Exiled and Hybrid: Nineteenth-Century Latin American Women Travel Writers. During her candidacy for the MA, she published "A Female Conquistador: The Contradictions of Colonial Discourse in the Countess of Merlin's 'Viaje a la Habana'" in Kunapipi, Journal of Post-Colonial Writing, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, 2001.