CHICANA PERSPECTIVES ON THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC MOURNING
María J. Durán
A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of
English and Comparative Literature in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Chapel Hill 2019
ABSTRACT
María J. Durán: Chicana Perspectives on the Politics of Public Mourning (Under the direction of María DeGuzmán)
Recent studies of late twentieth-century loss, grief, and mourning have turned to political theory to address mourning’s transformative, future-oriented vision for democratic society. My dissertation builds on this political theory discourse to argue that manifestations of public mourning in Marisela Treviño Orta’s Braided Sorrow (2009), Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1994), and Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad: A Chicano Take on the Tragedy of Electra (2003) give rise to a new formulation of political agency for Chicanas and advance a means for political dissent. These three Chicana/o plays reveal the ways structural forms of violence differentially impact marginalized and disenfranchised Chicana/o communities, including farmworkers in central California, working-class women in Ciudad Juárez, and chola/os in East Los Angeles. Examining the loss resulting from different forms of violence that transpire in these plays, my project concludes that Chicanas become political agents who disrupt the disavowal of loss in Chicana/o communities by dominant society; reject the privatization of mourning; expand notions of what mourning can look like in the public sphere; question whose losses “count” or carry forth social significance; defend the grievability of Chicana/o bodies; challenge the social invisibility of loss and social injury; urge public recognition for loss; and demand both
responsibility and accountability from state authorities. In these ways, Chicanas’ public
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Above all, I thank God for the opportunity to do the intellectual work that I do and for bringing people into my life who have helped me grow as a junior scholar.
I would like to express my deep gratitude to my advisor, Dr. María DeGuzmán, for her guidance, mentorship, and unwavering support. Over the years, she has encouraged me to chase footnotes, read widely, and make interdisciplinary connections. Her intellectual rigor is matched only by her wit and genuine humility. I am truly fortunate to have been one of her mentees and to have worked under her fearless leadership for the UNC Latina/o Studies Program, the first
program of its kind in the Southeast. I hope one day I can be the kind of engaged-scholar she is: a luminary of Latina/o intellectual cultures, an advocate for Latina/o communities, and a
champion for social justice.
I would also like to extend my gratitude to my committee members, Drs. Laura Halperin, Ashley Lucas, Ariana Vigil, Michelle Robinson, and Shayne Legassie, for the insightful
suggestions and collegiality that each of them offered to me over the years. Special thanks to Dr. Lucas, who has mentored me since before I started my graduate studies.
My heartfelt gratitude to my best friend, Monet Phillips, whose unrelenting support from afar has never let me forget that the voices of women of color in the academy matter. My mentor, esteemed colleague, and best friend, Gale Greenlee, always nurtured me in more ways than one. Special thanks to IME’s co-directors, Kathy Wood and Maria Erb, who have provided countless opportunities for networking and professional development. But, in everything, they have reminded me to celebrate my accomplishments as a first-generation and working-class Latina, because traveling this road embodying these identities is not easy. Thanks to Yesenia Pedro Vicente for her smiling and encouraging face, and for always having breakfast ready for IME’s Writing Wednesdays. Thanks also to my IME family: Candace Buckner, Brionca Taylor,
Diamond Holloman, Sertanya Reddy, Joyce Rhoden, Yanica Faustin, and Don Holmes. Candace consistently reminded me that I could do this work and do it well.
The completion of my dissertation would not have been possible without the support of Jen Boehm and Amy Reynolds, who worked with me all hours of the day and night—in-person and via video-conferencing. I so appreciate all of our moments of joy and panic, as well as the calm reassurances that everything was going to be okay. I appreciate Raquel Soto and Mariana Ingram for being my prayer warriors, especially during the last months of my dissertation
writing. I also cannot forget to thank Jorge Montañez, who always casually, but genuinely, asked me how my dissertation was going.
Gracias a mi familia. Aunque quizás no entiendan, precisamente, a lo que me dedíco, siempre me han demostrado su apoyo y cariño. Mi mamá siempre me preguntaba como me iba con mis clases y mis estudiantes, siempre bromeando que como es possible que me volví profesora. Karen always encouraged me and never let me down. I am so grateful to her.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: FOUNDATIONS FOR THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC
MOURNING IN CHICANA/O THEATRE ...1
Introduction ...1
Public Mourning, Affect, and Performance ...6
Chicanidad and the History of Loss ...9
Review of Chicana/o Literature on Loss, Grief, and Mourning ...10
Theoretical and Methodological Approaches ...13
Mourning Becomes Pathology: The Influence of Freudian Psychoanalysis ...18
The Politics of Mourning in Political Theory ...22
CHAPTER 1: THE WAILING WOMAN, OR LA LLORONA: MATERNAL MOURNING AS RESISTANCE IN MARISELA TREVIÑO ORTA’S BRAIDED SORROW (2009) ...39
Introduction ...39
Ciudad Juárez and the Contexts for Femicide ...45
Representations of Femicide in Transborder Cultural Productions ...50
La Llorona Reimagined: From Tenochtitlan to the Borderlands ...56
La Llorona’s Grief: Public Expressions of Emotional and Physical Pain .62 Parental Grief: Freud Reexamined and the Metaphor of Amputation ...64
Grievability and The Concept of Bare Life in Ciudad Juárez ...66
Juárense Women Abandoned: The Problem of Criminal Impunity and Blaming the Victim ...69
Deprivatizing Loss, Politicizing Mourning ...75
CHAPTER 2: MOURNING SLOW VIOLENCE AND CONTESTING INVISIBILITY: MIGRANT FARMWORKERS IN CHERRÍE MORAGA’S
HEROES AND SAINTS (1994) ...79
Introduction ...79
McLaughlin and The Subaltern Status of Farmworkers ...86
Re-defining What Constitutes Violence ...87
The Visceral Head of Cerezita ...91
Crucifixion in the Vineyards: A Haunting Act of Mourning ...93
Mapping Violence on Land ...99
Dying Children and Dead Dolls ...102
From McLaughlin to Sacramento: Challenging Invisibility ...107
Grieving Mothers of McLaughlin: Public Mourning and Dissent in Sacramento ...110
The Agenda of Protest and Activist Lineages ...116
El Pueblo’s Right to Life and Collective Action ...117
CHAPTER 3: PERFORMING VIOLENCE AND MOURNING: THE CHOLA/O AND PATRIARCHAL POWER IN LUIS ALFARO’S ELECTRICIDAD (2003) ...121
Introduction ...121
Electra Becomes Electricidad: An Overview of the Literature ...128
The Chola/o Subculture ...132
The Barrio’s History of Marginalization and the Interpellation of Violence ...134
Chicana Grief and The Female Desire to “Get Out” of the Barrio ...138
Another Chola/o Creation Story: War, Violence, and (the lack of) Female Resistance ...144
Are We Family?: Orestes Becomes a Cholo and the Murder of
Clemencia ...153 Laughing to Keep from Crying: The Subversive Role of Humor in
Electricidad ...155 Electricidad: A Performance of Public Mourning and Negotiating the Theatre Space ...160 CODA: THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC MOURNING FOR CHICANA/OS AND BEYOND ...166
Scholarly Contributions ...168 The Mo(u)rning after María: Making Loss Count in ¡Ay María!
INTRODUCTION: FOUNDATIONS FOR THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC MOURNING IN CHICANA/O THEATRE
Introduction
A universal and natural response to loss, grief is one of the most powerful of human emotions. As Gail Holst-Warhaft asserts in The Cue for Passion: Grief and its Political Uses (2000), “[grief’s] emotional potential is inexhaustible” (9). To declare that grief has potential without limit suggests that it is much more than a passive and idle emotional state that limns how our lives have been injured and disrupted by loss. And yet, in a North American context, grief is often understood as a dis-ease,1 which transforms the natural reaction to loss to an ailment
requiring psychological and medical intervention. Though transdisciplinary discourses, as well as social and cultural frames, shape the understanding of grief and its expression (mourning), the field of psychology has considerably influenced on how our modern society understands grief.2 In short, it has advanced the pathologization and medicalization of grief,3 defining grief as a “debilitating emotional response” to loss that must be “worked through” quickly so as to reduce or altogether eliminate its encroachment on daily regular life (Granek 2010; 48).
1 Here, I signal the disruption of a state of “ease” that loss engenders.
One need not only look to the widely popularized “stage model” of grieving, posited by Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in Death and Dying (1969),4 to learn how grief has been treated as a process that one must “work through.” Though Kübler-Ross clarifies that these stages are not necessarily linear (or may not be experienced at all), her framework for grief work includes a starting point and an endpoint; the latter is denoted with the “acceptance” stage, a vague construction that marks the resolution of grief. This elusive resolution might be interpreted in popular discourses as what Nancy Berns has called “closure”: a socially constructed “new emotion” that explains what is needed to manage and ultimately end grief (3).5 The emphasis on the need to end grief cannot be understated, insofar as the assumption is we cannot carry on with our daily lives if grief maintains its interference. This is all to say that there is a societal
expectation for the person who has experienced loss to work through grief as quickly as possible in order to return to his/her functional and productive life, as if that life has not been shattered by the loss itself and any specter of “normalcy” still exists. If the person is not able to efficiently mourn and finish the labor of grief, then his/her grief gets labeled as abnormal; it is viewed as a pathology that must be evaluated, medically treated, and monitored.6
Accordingly, modern understandings of grief focus far too much on its supposed dysfunction, which has consequently produced an “erasure of how we used to think about grief as a holistic, necessary, human relational experience” (Granek 277). It would seem, then, that psychological constructs of grief and medical interventions based on its pathologization are the
4 The five stages of grief that Kübler-Ross presents are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. 5 In Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us (2011), Berns explores the relationship between mourning and closure within a culture that is uncomfortable with grief. She further examines how politics and industries (i.e. media and a capitalist market) appropriate the idea of closure to profit on people’s pain.
dysfunction and that “denying the normalcy, intensity, and duration of grief is [in fact] the
pathology” (Granek 280). It is on this note I explore grief’s aforementioned unlimited “emotional potential” by considering a different set of questions: What do responses to loss look like when they are not inhibited or pathologized? Why do expressions of grief matter? What can mourning reveal about loss or about the person who grieves? What are grief’s possibilities and which discourses or theoretical frameworks illuminate them? Finally, what kind of work can mourning carry out? My dissertation investigates these questions in relation to Chicana/o communities, whose histories of resistance to cultural, social, and political oppression since 1848 frequently return to experiences of loss. I explore these experiences of loss in three distinct texts of Chicana/o theatre, wherein loss is clearly wrought by structural forms of violence. Because mourning becomes entangled in systemic injustices, I consider how mourning becomes politicized, especially when it manifests in public forms.
US-Mexico border, which has seen hundreds of cases of femicide; a migrant farmworker community in Central California whose denizens, young and old, are plagued with the effects of a toxic living and working environment; and East Los Angeles, where the formation of gangs has created a distinctive culture and advanced extra-legal measures for justice involving violence. In these various sites of loss, Chicanas’ acts of public mourning maintain a capacity for political resistance, and they serve as reminders of how there is agency to be found even in the midst of bereavement for Chicana/o communities; in many ways, they echo the idea that the dead and that which has been lost are still alive and politically relevant.7
Though it might be argued that, within the context of loss and grief, Chicanas are
suffering subjects and/or relegated to a status of victimhood, my dissertation sheds light on how their acts of mourning are political affective responses8 to loss that actively move beyond victimhood. I argue that mourning operates under the premise that “pain opens up new
perceptions of the relationship between one’s body and the world around it and creates new ways of moving through the world” (Bost 31). I read acts of public mourning by Chicanas as acts of transformation that create necessary spaces for Chicanas to move in defiance of patriarchal, misogynist, and otherwise oppressive institutions and where they consequently redefine their relationship to the world around them. While these acts most immediately concern the agency
7 In American Mourning: Tragedy, Democracy, Resilience (2017), political theorist Simon Stow begins with a bold claim: “The dead are alive in the American polity” (1), and thus he makes note of the political participation of the dead as he also critically meditates on the relationship between the dead, mourning, and democracy.
8 Here, I take direction from Laura Halperin’s study of works by Latina writers in Intersections of Harm: Narratives
and political consciousness of Chicanas, it is important to note that they are also inclusive endeavors. Chicanas’ acts of public mourning defend the welfare of Chicana/o families and communities, as they move towards a larger vision of social justice.
For the purposes of this dissertation, I define grief as the “primarily emotional (affective) reaction to the loss of a loved one through death” (Strobe et al 5).9 I understand grief as
something that encompasses various felt emotions in response to an experience of loss, ranging from sorrow, despair, depression, fear, and loneliness to anger. For this reason, I do not reduce grief to one emotion. Grief is a subjective experience, given that there is a distinctive bond between the individual and the loss. Individuals may have a sense of shared grief with others, but each individual will experience loss in a personal way and, consequently, may not have the same emotional response.10 Given the possibility of various emotional responses to loss, mourning particularly denotes the “social expressions or acts expressive of grief that are shaped by the (often religious) beliefs and practices of a given society or cultural group” (Strobe et al 5). 11 Mourning points to the construction of cultural and social frames of meaning for understanding and negotiating loss. The expression of grief conventionally follows cultural norms and scripts so that mourning becomes something configured, integrated, and disciplined in society. Rituals (i.e. wakes, funerals, etc.) and discourses (i.e. eulogies and obituaries) neatly package the experience of loss and its emotional responses, while they also contain grief and its expression. Moreover,
9 I interpret the “loved one” as referring to a person, any living organism (i.e. animal), an object, or an abstract idea. Can it include other animals besides human ones?
10 I want to clarify that my dissertation relies on both tangible and intangible understandings of loss—physical loss (i.e. loss of a loved one) and the loss of something abstract (i.e. relationship), respectively.
mourning is often marked with a temporal quality that puts emphasis on overcoming grief—that is, there is an impulse for the bereaved to come to terms with loss and move on to the normalcy of life, lest the experience of loss produce “complicated grief.” Unregulated mourning or mourning that deviates from cultural and social norms is not deemed socially acceptable, as it challenges social structures that work to shape and police emotional responses to loss.
This dissertation is concerned with the ways Chicanas in the selected plays configure their own expressions of grief, attesting to the ways that experiences of loss perform affective ruptures that, in turn, warrant affective responses. These responses need not follow cultural or religious prescriptions12 that operate to curate grief. Resisting and revising conventions of mourning, Chicanas create different possibilities for what expressions of grief might look like and how they might bear political implications. They carry mourning into the public sphere to disrupt, question, confront, and make demands, so that public mourning positions them as political agents. Ultimately, the public mourning of Chicanas registers dissent, advancing political statements and making political interventions for marginalized Chicana/o communities whose experiences of loss risk become ignored, silenced, and erased.
Public Mourning, Affect, and Performance
Public mourning, as it is conceived in this dissertation, refers to the free expression of grief that makes claims for political change. It is an affective mechanism that challenges the private valences and iterations of grief in order to make loss and its conditions of possibility in marginalized communities visible; the visibility of loss through public mourning urges both
accountability and social responsibility for injustice. In discussing public mourning as an
affective mechanism, I draw on affect theory’s dialogue with cultural studies as an orientation to explain the social and political uses of the feeling of grief, and, in particular, its public-facing expression. Some theorists make a distinction between affect and emotions or feelings, treating affect as a precursor to emotions.13 For instance, Deborah Gould defines affect as a “bodily, sensory, inarticulate, nonconscious experience,” and she notes that it is “something that we do not quite have language for, something that we cannot fully grasp, something that escapes us but is nevertheless in play, generated through interaction with the world, and affecting our embodied beings and subsequent actions” (20). Additionally, Brian Massumi understands affect as a bodily “intensity” that is beyond narrative and pre-subjective, while he asserts that emotion is a
“qualified intensity,” or “a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of experience which is from that point onward defined as personal” (28). For the purposes of my dissertation, I make no such distinction, largely because the affective response to loss (i.e. bodily sensation) are entangled with the emotions of experiencing loss; the emotion of grief can never really separate itself from the affect of loss from which it derives.14 Both affect and emotion are transmitted and circulated through subjects. To make these two distinct from one another seems to emphasize a cause and effect relationship, and it problematically forecloses emotions’
13 Theorists including Brian Massumi (Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation), Teresa Brennan (The
Transmission of Affect), and Deborah Gould (Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS) treat affect as more of an external stimulation that hits the body.
14 I treat affect and emotion as synonymous terms, as do Sara Ahmed and Juana María Rodríguez. In response to Massumi’s work, Ahmed writes, “I think that the distinction between affect/emotion can under-describe the work of emotions, which involve forms of intensity, bodily orientation, and direction that are not simply about ‘subjective content’ or qualification of intensity. Emotions are not ‘after-thoughts’ but shape how bodies are moved by the worlds they inhabit” (230) in The Promise of Happiness (2010). In a similar manner, Rodríguez argues that affect “is not about individual self-contained emotions, but rather how feelings function in the realm of the social,” and she also admits that her “use of affect, feeling and emotion becomes entangled in imprecise ways” (17; original
capacity to affect. Moreover, the public mourning of Chicanas involves the corporeal as much as it does the emotions that result from loss.
In addressing what public mourning by Chicanas looks like in the selected dramatic works, I delineate the ways in which it engages cultural practices and different aesthetics in storylines that center loss. More than this, however, I aim to increase attention on public mourning within Chicana/o theatre,15 and it begins with a subtle but necessary discursive distinction: the distinction between practices of mourning and acts of mourning. As the former points to performative language, it does so by circumscribing mourning around cultural norms that are deemed socially acceptable; put another way, the implied rhetorical implications of practices of mourning veer towards prescriptive understandings of mourning that situate
expressions of loss in repeatedly conventional, arguably ritualistic, ways. The instances of public mourning in the plays I investigate are certainly informed by culture and religion, but they extend beyond traditionally observed or rehearsed practices of mourning. They are, instead, acts of mourning, which discursively highlights their performance (especially as I situate these acts in a theatrical context) and their subsequent expansion of the cultural, religious, spatial, and
temporal prevailing limitations of mourning. These limitations aim to contain grief, and thus the discursive privileging of acts over practices reveals how loss can be newly expressed, negotiated, and leveraged; as an act, mourning is an action that performs a kind of work in addition to (and not in opposition to) grief work. Reframing mourning in this way disrupts conventional and apolitical understandings of mourning.
Chicanidad and the History of Loss
The attention to public acts of mourning by Chicanas, admittedly, would not be possible without first acknowledging a colossal loss that has spawned over a century of fear, pain, and sorrow: the violent territorial US acquisition of the Southwest and the subsequent dispossession of Mexicano and indigenous groups caused by US colonialism. I say this to clarify that my use of Chicana/o aligns with literary scholar Marissa López’s statement that “the essence of chicanidad lies in negotiating that engulfment [of Mexican land]” (105; original emphasis).16 To grapple with mourning, one must recognize loss as a quintessential part of chicanidad,17 and there is also an imperative to resist historical amnesia, even as mourning might unfold as a process to “work through” loss in a way that risks unintentional forgetting or even disremembering. Because loss and mourning, as it is tied specifically to 1848 (but also prior to and after this date), encompasses a vast range of historical incidents as well as individual and group experiences, it is beyond the scope of this work to comprehensively examine grief as a recurring affective response and mourning as both a historical and ongoing process that informs chicanidad.
As a result, this dissertation turns to local sites of loss, which is, chiefly, a means to contextualize and examine mourning in the selected plays, but it is also to illuminate that Chicana/o nationalism is not something locked in the past; it remains relevant today. My
attention to local sites of loss affirms that there remain specific Chicana/o historical, cultural, and political realities worthy of scrutiny, even as they extend to or are directly connected with
16 In the short essay, “Why I Still Believe in Chicanx Studies,” López cautions against substituting Chicanx with Latinx because the latter term “makes it too easy to consolidate difference and erase history,” and she contests the term’s connotation of transnationalism, which is an assumption that disregards the “transnational and transamerican perspectives” advanced by individuals in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
transnational issues. Accordingly, it is no coincidence that the first chapter of this dissertation begins with Orta’s Braided Sorrow on the US-Mexico border. There is a recognition of transnationalism, as much as there is attention to a border space that mentally, spiritually and physically wounds individuals, that I wish to insert in my use of Chicana/o. In other words, I understand Chicana/o US-based oppression as linked to global struggles against oppression, and my aim is not to homogenize Mexican-American and Chicana/o peoples or their historical and political realities. Ultimately, this dissertation treats Chicana/o as a “living, breathing term with a past, a present, and a future” (López 105) and further understands it as a far more multivalent term than its original heteronormative and patriarchal conceptualization and instrumentation by the Chicana/o Movement of the 1960s.
Review of Chicana/o Literature on Loss, Grief, and Mourning
Though loss is a prevalent thematic concern in Chicana/o cultural productions, sustained critical attention on mourning is small in the field of Chicana/o Studies. To clarify, scholars refer to mourning, couched in matters like loss, grief, and trauma, in passing but only do few of them examine mourning and its implications using a concentrated approach that considers the source of grief and mourning; how individuals or communities negotiate grief; what form(s) mourning takes; and what the meaning of mourning is under the context in which it unfolds. Chicana/o and Latina/o scholars who have written exclusively about loss, grief, and/or mourning in relation to Chicana/o subjectivities include Belinda Rinn Rincón, Suzanne Bost, and Rafael Pérez-Torres.18
In the first chapter of Bodies at War: Genealogies of Militarism in Chicana Literature and Culture, Belinda Linn Rincón offers a necessary and robust study of the Chicana anti-war activist in literary and cultural narratives, engaging with the public performance of mourning by Las Adelitas de Aztlán, a Chicana antiwar collective (37).19 In examining how Chicanas situated their claims of political grievances in the public sphere, rather than in the intimacies of the private (where grief is often located), Rincón makes an excellent case for how mourning is leveraged to combat political repression, to extend the meaning of citizenship beyond the nation-state, and to restore the import of dissent (37). She primarily does so by drawing on the activist bustle of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium in Los Angeles as well as the anti-war political
sentiments of Vietnam.20
Expanding the perimeters of identity politics, which was so vital to the work of the Chicana/o Movement, Suzanne Bost focuses on different “corporeal boundary states” like illness, death, and mourning, and argues that they uncover new understandings for Chicana feminism in “From Race/sex/etc. to Glucose, Feeding Tube, and Mourning: The Shifting Matter of Chicana Feminism.” Bost turns her attention to Rest in Peace Gloria, an online altar that is unequivocally political and feminist (363). Bost notes that the mourners at the online altar, who reflect a diversity in ethnicity and race, eulogize Anzaldúa using liberatory statements that defy the boundaries of identity politics (363-364). She reads the mourners’ stories and expressions of
19 In particular, she argues that these Chicana activists (and other writers like Stella Pope Duarte) challenged the US state’s regulation of bereavement surrounding the Vietnam War using “unauthorized displays of mourning” to make “larger ethical claims about corporeal vulnerability” (37).
grief as political and anchored in Chicana feminism, suggesting that Anzaldúa’s loss has created a sense of community21 “as a potential response to the defensive and strictly nominal subject of identity politics” (366). In this way, Bost understands mourning as a political coalition-building framework (362) and treats the online altar as a valuable “political gesture.”
Lastly, pivoting towards psychoanalysis and highlighting a politics of loss in Chicana/o literature, Rafael Pérez-Torres discusses loss and melancholy in relation to Chicana/o narrative in the chapter, “Narrative and Loss,” and the stand-alone article, “Placing Loss in Chicana/o Narrative.” In “Narrative and Loss,” he argues that “loss ineluctably and inevitably informs mestizo consciousness,” (207), given that mestizaje originates in the conquest of both indigenous peoples and land. Theoretically, he employs melancholy22 to underscore how narrative functions as a site for the interaction between absence and presence, so that melancholia helps in the construction of a new Chicana/o subjectivity in a society that disenfranchises Chicana/o communities. The inclusion of loss and “the struggle to reclaim what can never be regained” (199) in Chicana/o cultural productions is meaningful, as it focalizes “the recognition of loss” (202), Pérez-Torres explains. While the core of Pérez-Torres’s analysis is the experience of loss, this recognition of loss in Chicana/o cultural productions certainly intersects with a politics of recognition that underlies public expressions of grief. In effect, public mourning openly
acknowledges loss, directly combatting instances of Chicana/o disenfranchised grief that make
21 Bost makes note of Judith Butler’s afterword to David Eng and David Kazanjian’s Loss, in which Butler signals a politics borne out of and in the wake of loss: “Loss becomes condition and necessity for a certain sense of
community” (468).
loss appear inconsequential or invisible and, worse, that perform an erasure of loss (and its conditions of possibility).
Theoretical and Methodological Approaches
The study of mourning has much to gain from multiple disciplines and discourses. Thus, I situate this project within the interdisciplinarity of Chicana/o Studies and thus turn to literary studies, women’s and gender studies,23 cultural studies, performance studies, and history to unpack mourning as categorically something more than just an anthropological phenomenon or an object of study for psychoanalysis. To that end, I acknowledging the social, historical, and political contexts that unfold within the plays, and my analyses are informed by the work of Diana Taylor, particularly her book entitled The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), which illuminates “the rift…between the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so called ephemeral repertoire of embodied
practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual)” (19; original emphasis). Interrogating how performance can inform the expressive cultures of the Americas, Taylor argues that performance circulates knowledge through the transmission of embodied action. Therefore, she calls for a move away from the “archive” (i.e. textual documents, films, letters, or other print material) and toward the repertoire, which she theorizes as ephemeral forms of
knowledge (i.e. music, dance, the vernacular, rituals, etc).
As a result, I understand acts of mourning as part of a Chicana/o theatrical archive but, even more so, as part of a Chicana/o repertoire that both stores and transmits knowledge about
Chicana/o histories and narratives of grief. Acts of mourning offer alternative perspectives that are an addition to (not counter to) the archive, serving as ontological and epistemological moments that highlight Chicana/o experiences and communities. The utility of the repertoire becomes especially crystallized when I examine stage directions, mechanisms through which affect comes alive on stage, and embodied behaviors, broadly speaking. The Chicana/o repertoire, as it is presented in this dissertation through performed acts of mourning, might be considered ephemeral and, at the very least, varying in its iterations, given that no artistic production of the her plays is ever the same. However, my adoption of Taylor’s idea of the repertoire reinforces the question, how can we access that which has been lost in the archive? Additionally, I ask, how do these three plays provide a larger, aggregate repertoire about Chicana loss and grief?
Hence, it seems that the repertoire is also suffering from and connected to a sense of loss; given its emphases on rehearsal and repetition, in addition to improvisation and play,
performance allows us to access and perhaps even recuperate archival losses.24 Indeed, Peggy Phelan explains that the ephemerality of performance is fitting and generative for the study of loss.25 We might then consider how the selected plays of this dissertation access the affective realities of past and present grief that pervade the daily lives of Chicana/o communities. Of course, these plays also transmit histories and narratives about sites of loss that have been marginalized, made invisible, or generally erased from the archive. Performance, then, might be a means through which to enact grief and, as a result, stage how mourning is imbued with political resistance. The affective component of mourning in performance something that I want
to foreground, especially in light of the caution toward emotion that influential theatre theorists like Bertolt Brecht, whose works center questions of oppression and the advancement of social justice, have advanced. Following Plato’s belief that the expression of feelings operates in opposition to reason, as articulated in his Republic, Brecht’s epic theatre modeled a didactic experience that appealed to reason, in addition to feelings, precisely to encourage spectators to remain critical throughout the performance.
Affect theorists including Sara Ahmed, Ruth Leys, and Lisa Blackman have critiqued the dichotomy of cognition and emotion, and “the affective turn” in the humanities has likewise pushed back against the bifurcation of cognition and emotion.26 My dissertation follows this line of reasoning, and it also does not privilege resistant action for social change over affect. Douglas Crimp challenges the idea of giving larger importance to action over affect in his germinal essay “Mourning and Militancy” (1989). Focusing on the activism around the AIDS “crisis” in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he demonstrates the binary between mourning and militancy and strongly encourages activists to spend time sitting with and processing their grief before, perhaps hastily, moving towards action. Crimp further encourages activists to marry mourning with militancy in order to advance a militant kind of mourning. In so doing, he contests the idea that mourning accomplishes little or nothing at all. To conceptualize mourning as something passive empties it of its political possibilities. However, it also does not critically consider other important work that might not, at first glance, be counted as political: bearing witness to the loss; expressing grief over the loss to combat invisibility; paying homage to the loss; and restoring human
26 The “affective turn” to which I refer takes up debates regarding the Cartesian binary opposition between reason and emotion and reverses the hierarchy that subordinates emotion to reason (e.g. passions and feelings are
dignity, especially to bodies that have been dehumanized or otherwise treated as expendable. While mourning does not always lead to political action or change for Chicana/o communities, it still must be valued as an affective mechanism that both makes important interventions on its own right and provides a starting point for conventional forms of political activism.
This project also aims to dismantle disciplinary boundaries around mourning that do not engage the subject matter of gender and its intersections with dissent in Chicana/o Studies. Accordingly, I have molded this project with the interdisciplinary work of Chicana feminists that has rightfully challenged the exclusion of Chicanas in a male-centered cultural nationalism preoccupied with interethnic race and class oppression. The sites of loss that this dissertation explores deliberately center the experiences of Chicanas and their acts of mourning and, in so doing, foreground questions of gender. This approach is particularly germane given the ways that mourning has been historically gendered, presenting the essentializing assumption that women are more “emotional” than men and therefore more suited to perform mourning, sometimes on behalf of the family or community. In this light, mourning might be treated as a valuable cultural exercise or social responsibility that is specifically assigned to women, but it fails to consider the expression of grief as a liberatory and political possibility for women. We might understand, then, how the gendering of mourning would render mourning as something passive and incredibly disempowering, if women are treated as one-dimensional suffering subjects. This dissertation contests the idea that mourning is passive and instead subscribes to the idea that mourning “can help resolve political and social tensions that resist resolution through other means” (Pool 2012, 185), which has become an area of focus in political theory.
serve as analytical lenses for unpacking politics. More specifically, my research considers how mourning gains political force and what kinds of political ideas—diagnostic and/or
prescriptive—are attached to different sites of loss and their respective acts of public mourning by Chicanas in the works of the selected Chicana/o playwrights. The particular impulse for my use of political theory is grounded in transformation, as I seek to deploy public mourning as a means toward addressing the social injustices that Chicana/o communities face and as an affective mechanism that can help reshape the political landscape for Chicana/os. As J. Peter Euben writes, “A theory, or at least a political theory, does not merely describe the world but carries prescriptive force in the sense of creating an imaginary future that either invites or discourages theoretical and political agency” (100). This is to say that political theory can make valuable interventions in a polity, and thus I follow in the footsteps of other theorists who have posited mourning, in numerous angles, as a meaningful source of political intervention.27
Inasmuch as radical political changes are often precipitated by moments of national catastrophe and tragedy,28 this dissertation argues that acts of public mourning for loss in Chicana/o
communities that may not be “counted” as catastrophe also demand political transformation.
Accordingly, Giorgio Agamben writes, “Just as, during periods of anomie and crisis, normal social structures can collapse and social functions and roles break down to the point where culturally conditioned behaviors and customs are completely overturned, so are periods of mourning usually characterized by a suspension and alteration of all social relations” (222). This kind of “suspension” and “alteration” in social dynamics are what the selected plays I examine precisely exhibit; in addition, as works of theatre, they literally engage in a suspension—an arrest—of time and space involving an audience. Still, outside of these sites of loss, outside of these Chicana/o communities, and outside of the theater space, mourning can aspire to make larger interventions on social (and political) relations pertaining to Chicana/os, as imagined by political theorists who understand mourning as a generative tool that might revise and revitalize the polity as well as embrace a commitment towards justice in US democracy.29
Mourning Becomes Pathology: The Influence of Freudian Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) has largely influenced Western approaches to loss, and, though Freud conceptualizes mourning as a psychological process of working through grief, many disciplines outside of the health sciences have wrestled with loss, grief, and mourning. Freud primarily approaches the subject of grief by articulating a distinction between mourning and melancholia. Both of these psychological processes are a reaction to “loss of a loved person” or “of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (Freud 243). Whereas mourning constitutes an eventual withdrawal of the lost object, Freud contends that melancholia diverges from
29 There is an argument to be made, however, that grief (paired with the political activity of mourning) can
mourning in its preservation of the lost object at the cost of feelings of hatred or anger directed towards the self. The symptoms of melancholia, which Freud considers a kind of interminable or even failed mourning, include “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world…[and] a delusional expectation of punishment” (Freud 244) that seemingly capture the “inability to resolve grief and ambivalence precipitated by the loss” (Eng and Kazanjian 3), or the inability to “move on.”
Rather than explain the implications of Freud’s essay or trace its development in
psychoanalysis literature,30 suffice it to say that discourses of mourning since the publication of “Mourning and Melancholia” have embraced, adapted, and opposed Freud’s understanding of mourning. I want to briefly sketch a few of the ways that select scholars have engaged with mourning and/or melancholia; and, in so doing, I will present some interpretations that focalize one key point in Freud’s essay: the normative distinction between mourning and melancholia, where Freud conceptualizes the latter as a pathological response to loss due to an inability to detach from the “lost object.” Indeed, this is a line of inquiry with which scholars, and especially scholars of color, have grappled and contextualized around questions of social and system injustice that concern racialized or queer bodies. Scholars like Jose Estebán Muñoz, Anne Cheng, and David Eng are invested in disrupting the idea that mourning can become
pathological, and I contend that their interpretations of Freud illustrate how grief is something ingrained in the lived experiences of people of color and, accordingly, how mourning might be understood as perennial but certainly not pathological. By de-pathologizing melancholia, these
scholars reclaim mourning in political ways that center its generative capacities and its viability as a tool of resistance; they also importantly treat mourning as a personal and social
phenomenon.
Queer politics and aesthetics scholar José Esteban Muñoz, for instance, argues for a need to de-pathologize melancholia and proposes that it is “‘structure of feeling’ that is necessary and not always counterproductive and negative” as well as a “mechanism that helps us
(re)reconstruct identity and take our dead with us to the various battles we must wage in their names—and in our names” (74). In this way, melancholia can be understood as an ongoing “structure” and “mechanism” necessary for advancing a politics of identity for the oppressed— for both the living and the dead. In fact, Muñoz points to melancholia’s daily presence in the lives of oppressed subjects: “melancholia, for blacks, queers, or any queers of color, is not a pathology but an integral part of everyday lives” (Muñoz 74). If social injustices cause and exacerbate melancholia on an everyday basis, then perhaps Muñoz points to another
dialogue with Muñoz when he asserts that melancholia, as a mechanism, enables us to “take our dead with us.”
Adding to a discourse of de-pathologizing melancholia, as well making a case for its integral part in the lives of racialized subjects, are Eng and Ann Cheng, who have both theorized an Asian American specific form of racial melancholia.31 They suggest that Asian Americans must negotiate the loss of ideals of assimilation (the lost object) with which they remain
ambivalently attached (i.e. model minority stereotype). In particular, Cheng contends that, even as the melancholic individual wrestles with loss,32 the individual also obtains some kind of nourishment from it, so that these often unacknowledged and painful losses form an Asian American subjectivity lost to a true sense of “American” identity due to US racial dynamics. These losses are especially painful because of the social status of the lost object, as Eng argues in “Melancholia in the Late Twentieth Century”: “women, homosexuals, people of color, and postcolonials are all coerced to relinquish and yet to identify with socially disparaged objects on their psychic paths to subjectivity” (1278; emphasis mine). In other words, Eng notes that the ambivalent attachment to lost objects that are “socially disparaged,” or devalued, produce oppressed subjectivity.
In these ways, scholars of color have pushed back against Freud’s original theorization of melancholia as pathological. They have used a psychoanalytic lens to assert that racialized subjects inhabit a productive, perhaps an imminent and necessary, melancholic process that can operate on an axis of resistance. It is not a state of illness, which thus challenges the stark
31 See David L Eng, "Melancholia in the Late Twentieth Century" and Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (2001).
normalization and pathology that Freud draws between the two psychological processes. The works of Muñoz, Eng, and Cheng does not dismiss Freud’s psychoanalytic insights regarding mourning, but they challenge the idea that there must be a detachment from the lost loved object. In their alternative psychoanalytic accounts, which underscore the political resistance of
melancholia, they ultimately favor an attachment to the lost object, or at least they do not condemn such an attachment.
The Politics of Mourning in Political Theory
Beyond the fields of the natural sciences and humanities, psychoanalysis has been profitably employed by political theorists,33 and it has notably influenced the sustained inquiry about the politics of mourning over the last several years. As David W. McIvor and Alexander Keller Hirsch note in the introduction to The Democratic Arts of Mourning (2019), political theorists have framed mourning as “the basis for the work of political theorizing and for the political work of building communities of solidarity” (xvii).34 One of the leading voices on the politics of mourning is Judith Butler, whose work on mourning takes as its starting point reading Antigone as a subversive figure of grief and mourning. Drawing on the ways in which Antigone publicly mourns the loss of her brother, Butler argues that the figure’s laments challenge norms regarding grief and, on a larger level, interrogate the limits of the law; thus, Butler reads
33 In “Psychoanalysis and the Study of Political Science,” Shelliann Powell traces the contributions and applications of psychoanalysis in political theory. In addition, Routledge has recently published a comprehensive handbook that showcases the development of psychoanalytic political theory in the 20th century, including how it might be aptly applied to study race, gender, nationalism, etc. See Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory (2019), edited by Yannis Stavrakakis. Despite the growth of psychoanalysis in political theory and its critical possibilities, some skepticism remains about its application in the field. For instance, Nancy Luxon has challenged political theory’s appropriation of psychoanalysis, specifically arguing that affects like anger, which can be channeled into meaningful political work, might be written off as pathological. For more, see Luxon’s “Beyond Mourning and Melancholia: Nostalgia, Anger and the Challenges of Political Action.”
Antigone’s mourning as an important political subversion.35 Butler’s more recent work on mourning pivots from theorizing its subversive capacities and toward questioning its relation to precariousness36 and grievability, which allows her to envision how loss can operate as a means for solidarity within communities. To explain, Butler posits that political communities negotiate, by way of differential power relations and positionalities, whose lives are deemed “grievable,” or lives that are otherwise acknowledged and considered worthy of mourning. As a kind of
corrective, to defend the grievability of all human lives, she theorizes a universal precariousness for all bodies—one in which everyone is subject to a condition of vulnerability and also
dependent on other bodies, which theoretically advances the idea that no human life is more grievable than another.
For Butler, the belief that all human bodies are vulnerable builds solidarity and collective responsibility, and loss (as well as mourning) “becomes condition and necessity for a certain sense of community” (Eng and Kazanjian 468). Butler’s politics of mourning, with its initial emphasis on subversion and its later recognition or the acknowledgement of grief for all human lives, is a main consideration of my project that unfolds in two ways. First, I see Antigone’s subversive mourning, per Butler’s reading, as engaging in an unequivocal feminist project that disrupts normative practices of mourning (i.e. the manner of the expression of mourning in the Greek polity) and thereby expands the limits of mourning to enact agency. Second, the emphasis
35 In the Greek drama, Antigone defies the state by mourning her brother, Polyneices, in what is considered a publically disruptive way, and she insists on his burial, eventually burying him twice, against the will of Creon the King (also her uncle). It is important to note that Butler views Antigone “not as a political figure, one whose defiant speech has political implications, but rather as one who articulates a prepolitical opposition to politics” (page number).
on the question of grievability is particularly relevant to the Chicana/o communities I examine, which are often viewed as unimportant, subaltern, and disposable, notwithstanding that the treatment of Chicana/o bodies indicates that they are undeserving of mourning by dominant Anglo-American society and, in some cases, by members within Chicana/o communities. Butler’s ideas of social vulnerability and dependency direct their attention to human life losses, but my dissertation advances a politics of recognition for both human lives and other kinds of losses, some of which are abstract. These include the loss of livelihood, land, safety of life forms, female reproduction, family, and kinship. This is to say that even non-human losses must be considered grievable and must be encompassed in a politics of mourning.
Butler’s attention to a politics of mourning has led to further research on questions of (in)visibility, community, democracy, and political change among scholars like Heather Pool, David McIvor, and Simon Stow. Pool has theorized political mourning37 as an important practice that subverts the invisibility of loss and challenges the status quo. Using the open funeral of Emmett Till,38 which was also open casket upon the insistence of his mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, as a case study to exemplify the work of public mourning for race relations and racial violence in the context of the Jim-Crow South, Pool argues that his “unusually visible death,” paired with the mobilization of mourning among African American political agents managed to garner white sympathy and oppose white supremacy in the South. Political mourning, then, has robust implications for oppressed communities, who can participate in the creation of a larger
37 In “Mourning Emmett Till,” Pool conceptualizes five components for political mourning: “contested identities, visibility, a failure of law, attributions of collective responsibility, and political change” (417). She clarifies that not all deaths are intertwined with a politics of mourning, but that, like in the case of Emmett Till, some losses and the response that follows are disruptive to a degree that “the only reasonable response is political change”; nevertheless, “calls for political change need not be successful to count as political mourning” (422).
platform for mourning that contests invisibility, provokes a sense of collective responsibility for justice, helps to expand (racialized) lines of belonging, and possibly prompts political change. Pool’s study of mourning Emmett Till buttresses the idea that mourning need not be a private affair and that there is much political traction to be gained in conceptualizing it as a public practice or process.
Accordingly, David McIvor’s recent work insightfully identifies mourning as a kind of “democratic work” and the beginning of “democratic repair,” insofar as it moves loss to the public sphere (i.e. the Black Lives Matter social movement; truth and reconciliation
commissions), where communities can engage in open dialogues about loss and past social traumas. McIvor understands mourning as necessarily public, which seems fitting as he discusses the role of public civic and political institutions or how they might work through and/or mediate loss. Pool and McIvor discernibly advance a public attribute to a politics of mourning, and they insightfully address the concern of “what it might mean to organize a space around a shared vulnerability and agency” (Luxon 155). Lastly, Simon Stow’s scholarship works on the premise that “the stories a polity tells about the dead help shape political outcomes of the living” (2), as he theorizes how critical responses to loss might “reinvigorate and/or reshape American democracy through its rituals and practices of public mourning”39 (17). Like McIvor, Stow seems invested in using public mourning as a tool that might aid in addressing and correcting the
shortcomings of American democracy40, which fruitfully couches public mourning as a practice that can revitalize democracy and shape the future of politics.
One prominent claim with which Pool, McIvor, and Stow would agree is that loss, grief, and mourning are generative, producing an ongoing plurality of activities for political ends. They also understand mourning as an important political tool that helps to diagnose and critique social injustices that disproportionately impact under-represented communities. Political theory, in fact, positions mourning as a valuable source of insight that identifies how loss and subsequent
responses to loss are especially telling about contemporary politics and its problems. Responses to loss, or lack thereof, contribute to the elevation of unjust realities faced by under-represented communities, lifting them above political frays that disavow and/or deliberately mitigate their loss, grief, and mourning. Beyond situating mourning in a squarely theoretical domain, political theorists have done the important work of identifying and inviting political agency through acts of mourning, so that the politics of mourning constitute a practical intervention.
Dissertation Chapter Overviews
My dissertation explores three different sites of loss and mourning, which are
contextualized in three distinct Chicana/o plays: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico in Marisela Treviño Orta’s Braided Sorrow; the San Joaquin Valley, CA in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints; and the Boyle Heights district of Los Angeles, CA in Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad. Though these sites each have specific geospatial anchors, the plays gesture towards loss and mourning that might occur in similar settings encompassing migrant farmworker communities, US-Mexico
40 As a caveat, Stow also acknowledges that mourning, as political activity, can undermine democracy, and he sees the Greeks’ concern about grief in politics relevant for contemporary democratic politics. For more about how grief problematizes democratic politics, see especially pp. 7-12 in American Mourning: Tragedy, Democracy, Resilience
borderlands, and barrios that have a strong Chicana/o or Latina/o gang presence. Despite distinct geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts, I unite these spaces under the aegis of mourning, being mindful of the ways these fictional dramatic works are reflective of incidents and realities pertaining to Chicana/o communities.
The organization of the body chapters is guided by a migratory pattern that begins in Mexico, traverses the “herida abierta” that is the US-Mexico border,41 and ends in the urban spaces of Los Angeles, California—from maquila labor to farm work to gang culture. In part, this is to map the physical movements of bodies and the different locations they inhabit (either temporarily or permanently) in the three plays I examine, but it also metaphorically signals the ways in which peoples south of the US-Mexico border bear the weight of losses as they migrate to a new country in hopes of a better future.42 Migration can be classified in many ways, and it can be understood as voluntary or involuntary; to migrate is to experience some kind of loss, which may effect different kinds of psychological, emotional, and even physical responses. Nevertheless, this dissertation acknowledges the longstanding presence of indigenous and Mexican communities before the territorial gains of the US with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848,43 so that losses produced in the experience of migration stand in
41 My dissertation deliberately returns to the site-specific Chicana/o cultural contexualization of the border, as first theorized by Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). Thus, it contests the ways in which the border has been decontextualized, become a widely-used metaphor for liminality, abstractly spatialize, and/or universalized. For more on border theory and a critique of its decontextualization, see Mary Pat Brady’s “Fungibility of Borders” and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano’s “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: Cultural Studies, ‘Difference,’ and the Non-Unitary Subject”.
42 Various losses occur with migration, including the loss of home, family, and community; potentially, migration and resettlement can also lead to the fracturing or loss of language, culture, and a sense of identity.
addition to many other apertures for loss, grief, and mourning that do not necessarily entail migration; these apertures include colonialism, displacement, and territorial dispossession44. Indeed, Latina/o literary scholar Ylce Irizarry’s four-storied project identifies narratives of loss as instrumental for the study of Chicana/o and Latina/o literature, explaining that “one must recognize the losses the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo catalyzed—geographic, economic, and cultural” (38).45 She also addresses loss in relation to the “United States’ neocolonial path” following 1848, a path which she claims was largely set up by the northern migration of thousands Mexicans into the US (Irizarry 38).
Though the second chapter of my dissertation would argue that “narratives of loss” for Chicana/o communities, where loss is a product of cumulative structural injustices, find their origins in the arrival of Hernán Cortes and annihilation of Mexican indigenous peoples, I follow in Irizarry’s footsteps in calling attention to how a history of US neocolonialism, which may have originated with various seemingly benign “interventions,” has produced the very sites of loss my dissertation engages. These sites undoubtedly point to neocolonialism, as they
particularly address femicide along the US-Mexico border, environmental violence in migrant farmworker communities, and the formation of gangs in East Los Angeles. Moreover, I see northern migratory patterns as a significant force that both illuminates and contributes to the development of social and economic structural injustices for Mexican, Mexican-American, and Chicana/o communities.46 Lastly, another organizational component of my dissertation
44 For instance, see María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885).
45 Attending to the US’s neocolonial relationship with Mexico and acknowledging recovery projects for Chicana/o literary production, Irizarry locates the origins of Chicana/o literature in the eighteenth century, when writings documented how those who were born in the New World negotiated contact and conflict with Anglo-Americans (39).
emphasizes the distinctive ways that these Chicana/o plays draw on Mexican and Mexican-American cultural repertoires: folklore (specifically, the figure of La Llorona), the acto and activist legacies of El Teatro Campesino, and the Mexican performance tradition of the carpa47. These cultural repertoires contribute to the development of both the aesthetics and the politics of the plays I examine, and thus are invaluable tools for Chicana/o playwrights to advance a theatre for social change.
Chapter one, “The Wailing Woman, or La Llorona: Maternal Mourning as Resistance in Marisela Treviño Orta’s Braided Sorrow (2009),” frames femicide and the mourning of young, brown Mexican women in Ciudad Juárez, the first site of loss my dissertation treats. The chapter provides a review of transdisciplinary and intersecting approaches for understanding femicide in Ciudad Juárez, and grapples with the question of why femicide continues to happen in the
context of criminal impunity and the normalization of gender violence resulting from its repeated “performance.” I raise questions about grievability à la Butler, which elucidates the exploitation and disposability of women and thereby combats the seriality of violence against women. While many cultural productions about the femicides in Ciudad Juárez have focused on its causes or finding the culprit(s), this particular play turns away from such an approach and instead centers the city’s affective landscape of grief and mourning. It does so through its reimagination of La Llorona, a well-known figure of folklore in the Americas who bears many interpretations and contextualizations related to mourning.
implications for Mexico that radically changed its economic and political landscape, displacing thousands of Mexicans and forcing migration north for employment and survival.
Rather than kill her children, as the traditional story goes, La Llorona of Braided Sorrow becomes an ethereal defender of the vulnerable Mexican women living and working near the US-Mexico border, including the play’s protagonist, Alma, who has only recently arrived to Ciudad Juárez due to familial financial difficulties. Nevertheless, La Llorona cannot save all of the women from violence and death. Alongside Juárense women leading precarious lives, she, too, must combat misogyny and larger structures of power that adopt apathy toward or otherwise fail to adequately respond to crimes of femicide. I contend that La Llorona in Orta’s play is a
maternal presence that de-privatizes grief, propelling mourning into the public sphere in such a way that public mourning becomes a political response to gender-based violence. Here,
mourning is not contained in social spaces like wakes and funerals. La Llorona’s mourning, in fact, encroaches upon public spaces as she moves within Ciudad Juárez to save her children’s lives and as she publicly mourns the loss of her children in ways that might not be considered “socially acceptable.” She poetically explains her experiences of grief through monologue and simultaneously calls out the state’s inaction, incompetency, and lack of legal action.
loss and questions of grievability play important roles in the critique of Mexican criminal impunity as well as the demand for state responsibility. It also considers how Braided Sorrow’s use of La Llorona signals the loss of indigenous peoples and cultures, which importantly elucidates how the figure continues to haunt, through grief and mourning, the sociopolitical landscapes of Mexico and, chiefly, the US-Mexico border. Because the first chapter focuses on femicide in Ciudad Juárez and Mexican women, Chicana playwright Marisela Treviño Orta invites a transnational critical reflection of mourning based on a history of loss (beginning with Spanish colonization) that extends into the present day with gender-based violence in Mexico and then crosses into the US, where other forms of violence transpire. Hence, the transnational perspective with which I begin expands the parameters of understanding Chicana/o inasmuch as I imbue the term with both indigenous and Mexican histories of oppression.
Chapter 2, “Mourning Slow Violence and Contesting Invisibility: Migrant Farmworkers in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1994), probes a Chicana/o migrant farmworker
community plagued with continued toxic pesticide-use as a site of loss. Mirroring the real-life circumstances that occurred in the San Joaquin Valley of California from 1978 to 1988,
McLaughlin community (i.e. safe drinking water). Indeed, the invisibility of power authorities in the play denotes absolutely negligence and an unwillingness to see migrant farmworkers as something other than subaltern.
The matter of (in)visibility, particularly as it intersects with the issue of environmental injustice, is a guiding theme for my examination of mourning in Heroes and Saints. Drawing on environmental scholar Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, I argue that acts of mourning, originating from both the town’s children and grieving mothers, capture an insidious form of environmental violence and, in so doing, combat the relative invisibility of violence and death that circumscribe McLaughlin. At first glance, the use of harmful pesticides may not be perceived as violence, but I employ the theoretical lens of slow violence and its robust
engagement with environmentalism to read damages to the land and injuries to the body48 caused by pesticides as a distinctive kind of violence—one that occurs gradually over time and space. As Moraga’s play makes evident, environmental racism and injustice in the form of slow
violence threatens the well-being and survival of the subaltern migrant farmworkers living in the fictionalized town of McLaughlin. Accordingly, the play engages with the politics of neglecting and making invisible a Chicana/o community that labors to put food on the tables of US
households.
Acts of mourning in Heroes and Saints, then, are necessary for subverting the invisibility of slow violence and of an ailing migrant farmworker community. The play’s opening
crucifixion and the organized demonstration that later occurs in Sacramento have previously been read as instances of political protest, but I illuminate how they might also be read as public mourning. Led by Cerezita, the play’s protagonist who suffers a severe birth defect of her own, children in McLaughlin strikingly resist invisibility by engaging in their own public mourning act: the crucifixion of already-dead children in the fields. Community members led by Chicanas, most of whom are mothers, come together to express their grievances related to toxic living and working conditions, and they also collectively mourn the deaths of McLaughlin children in a public way. It is through mourning and its political efficacy that they call on governmental officials to action. Meanwhile, the television news reporter in the play broadcasts McLaughlin’s acts of mourning, which communicates the plights of subaltern migrant farmworkers to a larger audience and therefore expands the affective limits of mourning insofar as the public acts of mourning become televised.
wit significantly contrasts with the play’s mournful overtones, I contend that Moraga, too, understands the theater as an important space to make farmworkers visible. Ultimately, the acts of mourning examined in this chapter bring the grief of mothers to the fore, as does the first chapter, but it does so by reframing seemingly innocuous pesticide-use as environmental violence and by exploring the politics of invisibility in McLaughlin.
Chapter three, “Performing Violence and Mourning: The Chola/o and Patriarchal Power in Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad (2003)” pivots from the previous two chapters in its exploration of the intersection of grief and rage within the context of the barrio—an intersection, I argue, that illuminates how rage can displace the generative affective dimensions of mourning and
ultimately kindle retribution that leads to interpersonal violence, which involves both emotional and physical injury that brings about more loss. A contemporary re-telling of the Greek tragedy Electra, Alfaro’s Electricidad is set in the barrio of East Los Angeles, and more specifically, in the chola/o gang world of the East Side Locos. At center stage is the protagonist Electricidad, who very publicly mourns the death of her father and “king” of the barrio, Agamenón (“El Auggie”); Electricidad wishes to retaliate against her mother, Clemencia, for committing the murderous deed. Unlike the Greek iterations of the tragedy,49 Clemencia kills her husband to ostensibly seize power of the barrio for herself, but I draw attention to how the weight of grief over many years actually leads her to murder the patriarchal tyrant of her family and the East Side. I read Clemencia’s desire for power over the barrio as a means for self-governance and agency. Her narrative of forced matrimony and motherhood, given the barrio’s patriarchal proclivities, is not so different from the narratives that other female characters in the play,
