Swimming in Anzaldúa's Archive: How Water, Serpents, and Sirenas Build Chicana Feminist Worlds

Wayne. "La Sirena." Ferrebeekeeper, 14 June 2018

Looking at the Anzaldúa papers in the Benson archives on the UT Austin campus was like poking only the smallest tip of the largest iceberg. The few hours I spent with these materials—examining a small pile of folders from boxes most relevant to my research—were indelibly thought-provoking. Anzaldúa's work is central to my research interests, particularly materials related to children's and young adult literature, queer femininity, and water imagery in folkloric contexts.

The theme most compelling to me in the archives was water. In "Altares: On the Process of Feminist Image Making" (box 57, folder 2), Anzaldúa comments on the sea and seahorse as symbols: "My sea horse represents the active yet dynamic feeling ______ [sic] of the universe and of my own potential. The masculine and feminine aspects perfectly, gracefully balanced [...] The sea is my image of the power of the source. That deep unconscious from whence consciousness emerges." By describing the sea as the source of consciousness and the seahorse as a dynamic symbol of balanced femininity and masculinity, she establishes a connection between water, symbolism, identity, and gender.

This is foundational for how I invoke Anzaldúa's theories in my research on water as a site for Latinx identity determination and interrogation. Several papers invoked water in relation to folklore, and I'm interested in developing this Anzaldúan approach as a framework to examine aquatic female figures and symbols—la serpiente, la sirena, la Llorona—and the art created about and for them as a distinctly Chicana approach to watery, feminist worldbuilding.

The manuscripts of "Altares: On the Process of Feminist Image Making" illuminated Anzaldúa's conceptions of feminine symbols and images in her own spiritual practices. She describes "La Serpiente," the female serpent: "Black, silent, slithering. Not only is the All that we fear projected into it. The alien, the most alien of all animals." For her, the serpent staff "remind[s me] of the spirit of the body," as "The female animal self has been denigrated for so many centuries that it's hard to eradicate the hatred and fear of the body, of the female sexuality that I've internalized." She describes images that are often repeated, including the tree, the well ("the source of all nourishment, water the life substance"), "the strong enduring woman," "the bruja," "the embroidered yellow bag from Guatemala with two blue birds and a red flower—which holds my playing cards and dice. Dried red roses. A sea horse." Each of these symbols, which "transcends its physicalness," pushes me to think about the ecological images present in Anzaldúa's work and its folkloric references.

Anzaldúa comments on the historical and cultural resonances of working with these images: "All these images come from my childhood, my Chicana upbringing. Later when I started reading about Indians in Mexico and in the U.S. I realized that these people, my ancestors, were also venerated the same image. I kept going Wow! Wow! To have sucked such thick deep roots" (57.4). She also connects the work of creating altares to her work as a writer: "Writing is essentially an assimilation, elimination process. That's why it's so close to alchemy and altar-making. Both bring unconscious materials into consciousness. Both make light. Making light (luz) is the same as making soul. Therefore writing is a way of soul making, or spirit making" [sic]. I take this sentiment as inspiration in my own work—to include work of the soul in my academic endeavors.

Even more specifically, this work is culturally informed and also shaped by practices of gender: "The making of the altars is one of the oldest art forms devised and perpetuated by women [...] I think that the tradition of making altars has been for women a means to connect to the speechless part of ourselves [...] The altar represents the area of life that cannot be exploited, defiled, or raped." Beyond this feminist approach to altar making, Anzaldúa also describes the practice as a "hope-filled activity" that "means acknowledging that there are other world(s) besides the literal one and that we can access to it (them) by speaking with and through images" [sic]. This approach to altar making as an optimistic form of world-building connects the practice to that of imagining alternative futures, opening up new possibilities for the queer Chicanas invoked in Anzaldúa's work.

Looking at archival materials related to Anzaldúa's fictional works for children demonstrated how archives can capture ephemera related to publishing. I examined a manuscript of her picture book "Friends on the Other Side," with English and Spanish text and illustrations (box 71, folder 17). The plot follows a young girl, Prietita, who befriends Joaquin, a boy who has just crossed the border into Texas, and protects him from neighborhood kids who taunt him with "mojadito." For the migrant, being mojado can potentially be reclaimed through the framework of seeing water as a site not only of memory, trauma, and violence, but of power and Chicanx identity-building.

One line reads: "One afternoon while Prietita and Joaquín were playing naipes, the Mexican lotto, a neighbor woman arrived out of breath. 'The border patrol's coming!' She shouted. 'La migra!'" (21 of manuscript). The centrality of lotería in this moment brings attention to the cultural imagery associated with the cards, to which I have a particular interest in La Sirena—the mermaid featured not only on the cards but frequently replicated in pop cultural artifacts. The other illustrations in the book feature flora and fauna, and inside the herb woman's home are altares and images of La Virgen de Guadalupe. These materials connect Anzaldúa's theoretical discussions of altares, water imagery, and symbols in the lotería to her practice of writing fiction. The herb woman and La Virgen are two figures of feminine strength, as Anzaldúa describes in the "Altares" manuscripts as the symbol of the "strong enduring woman," or "la bruja."

Beyond the symbolic elements of the text, the archival materials also invite an extradiegetic reading, as I can hold in my hands the evidence of Anzaldúa's book reaching public markets. Press clippings in box 71, folder 18 include several features of the book in children's book press pages, all recommending the text as a multicultural reading experience. A review in Network News (May/June 1993) for National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights titled "Children Don't Believe in Borders" says: "When children are vilified [...] the future and well-being of entire communities hang in the balance. The type of injustices that immigrant communities [face] [...] The type of injustices that immigrant children are subject to indicates that their adult counterparts can expect no better. It has become imperative, then, that the experiences and viewpoints of immigrant children, and other youth as well, be integrated not only into the immigrant rights agenda but into all facets of our thinking and activism."

Looking at the manuscripts in conjunction with press responses gives me a sense of the academic community engaging with these works and situating them in conversations about the pedagogies of children's literature. However, I can't be certain to what extent these clippings were limited by the nature of their being saved by Anzaldúa or her publishing team.

A second piece of children's literature, "Prietita's Second Encounter with La Llorona" (6/18/1994), continues to build stories of Prietita as a young girl whose experience is shaped by cultural imagery of brujería and watery feminist figures. In "Second Encounter," "Prietita was walking up and down by the river looking for a special medicine plant. [...] knew she should return home, though it was getting later and later, something kept her there by the river." Her being drawn to the river speaks to La Llorona's power as connected to water and suggests that part of Chicana girlhood means engaging with and encountering the feminine mythical figure.

As Prietita realizes La Llorona's presence, she notices that "the soothing sounds the river made now seemed to echo the woman's humming." Prietita is soothed by the river, even as the figure makes her uneasy, supporting an integral part of my theorization that water for Chicanas is the place to engage with cultural knowledge, myth, pain, and comfort at once. Then Prietita goes to la curandera's house—the woman for whom she was looking for the plant—who tells her she's lucky she got away. She reminds Prietita of a man who came for a limpia after seeing La Llorona: "he suffered such a fright that he never set foot in a cantina again." Doña Lola, the curandera, tells Prietita this is a "caso," to teach him a lesson. Prietita engages with La Llorona as a symbol of feminist cultural knowledge, with an understanding that she is safe with La Llorona as a young girl in a way that the man who went drinking in the cantina is not.

Another manuscript I am excited to discuss is Anzaldúa's "Embodying La Llorona" speech (box 112, folder 9). She describes La Llorona as "a metaphor for speech and writing and one that authorizes me and other Chicanas to write [...] to explore what is unconscious or repressed or absent." La Llorona is no longer just an image in Mexican pop culture and mythology, but now also a metaphor for the artistic process of Chicanas uprooting repressed feelings.

Anzaldúa's concept of nepantla is invoked here: "There is a place, a space, an in-between place, a kind of borderlands where la Llorona collides with the symbolic order and makes an opening in the fragile wall of the law. I call this space nepantla. La Llorona threatens that law and order symbolic. She is the woman who refused to accept her role of dutiful mother-wife [...] La Llorona cannot speak, is placed outside language and thus outside the symbolic order of patriarchy." La Llorona is the feminist symbol for disrupting patriarchy and for taking power through occupying the in-between spaces. She functions in cultural mythology to comment on the role of the woman: "La Llorona draws the line between la mujer buena, the good woman (human) y la mujer mala, the bad or inhuman woman. Stories of La Llorona serve to distinguish between the symbolic order/law of the father from what challenges and threatens it."

To embody La Llorona is to take on Chicana feminism. "If a Chicana accepts and takes up her assigned gender role she is normal and good, if she does not she is abnormal and evil, i.e. monstrous. To be monstrous is to be inhuman, not-human. A woman becomes monstrous when her lover/husband rejects her." The in-betweenness and not-quite-humanness of La Llorona is where I also see an inherent connection to La Sirena and La Serpiente, both figures who are neither just animal nor deity nor human woman, and who exist in watery or fluid spaces.

Anzaldúa describes water as intrinsic to the symbolism of La Llorona; she is "near rivers—her wail the liquid sounds of running water." Her wails are not just watery but running, a dynamic engagement with femininity and feminist identity. Not only is identity fluid, but so too are the expressions of pain, activism, womanhood. "Like La Llorona the bold writer is un cominante, un viajante, a voyager, errante, vagabunda, nomad, cortacalles triply estranged, triply expatriated. More than she travels geographically, she travels the inner terrains of the mind, fantasy, dreams, memories. Those who travel are in exile." The Chicanas who follow after La Llorona are dynamic, nomadic, and expert in traversing nepantla.

In Anzaldúa's work, the watery archive is not just a metaphor but a methodology—a way of diving deep into cultural memory, resurfacing with symbols that shimmer with new meaning, and building worlds where Chicana feminists can breathe freely in the fluid spaces between land and sea, past and present, human and divine.