Peña, Manuel American Mythologies. Semiological Sketches

2013

result of her unorthodox manuscript, Massacre of the Dreamers, which "crossed boundaries of cultural criticism, social sciences and creative literature" (Massacre ix). Castillo has authored numerous works of fiction and non-fiction and has made major intellectual contributions to organizations such as The Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. Within part one, we will contextualize the historical, cultural, social, and political climate of the Chicano Movement which heavily influenced Chicano literature. Mexican-American communities throughout the Southwest from the nineteenth century onward will be the focus within the section titled "Historical, Cultural, Social, and Political Climate." Through the use of interviews, references, and images provided by the appendix, it is my hope that an adequate understanding of such a large subject will be provided. With Chicano literature in mind, I have chosen elements of the Chicano Movement most relevant to our topic. A definition of the terms 'Chicano' and 'Xicanisma,' a term coined by Castillo which has a direct relation to the term 'Chicano' and to Chicano literature, are provided and contextualized in the section titled "Chicano and Xicanisma." The section "Return to Aztlán" explores one of the most important premises of the Chicano Movement: the appropriation of the Aztec mythical homeland, Aztlán, by Chicanos in order to reclaim their ancestral rights to the Southwest. The section, "Chicano Literature: Life in Search of Form," briefly explores Chicano literature as a distinct literary category in American literature today which stems from the specific mixture of historical, cultural, social, and political elements of Mexican and American relations in the past two centuries. The literary analysis within the second-half of this thesis highlights and explores the intertextuality of Castillo's texts as they are in dialogue with mythological, historiographic, and literary discourses. Part two delves into the specific work of Ana Castillo and her contributions to Chicano literature. In the section "Reshaping Historiography and Myth through Historiographic Metafiction," we enter into a short exploration of the intimate relationship between myth, history, and literature in order to establish a foundational understanding of the subject. This will allow us to explore and analyze Castillo's literary techniques which work to blur the line between myth, history, and fiction. Hereafter, we explore Castillo's literary work in-depth. In the section "Mythic Place in Sapogonia," we explore the resemblance between the mythical Aztlán and the fictionalized country of Sapogonia as well as the association of mythical figures to the protagonists of the novel. These associations between myth, history, and literature are further complicated in the section "Shifting Narration within Castillo's Work," which focuses on frequent shifts in narrative perspective as a way to challenge notions of individual subjectivity within a text. This is both a challenge to traditional historiography and a return to a "more primordial, unified whole" (López, "Chicana/o Literature: Theoretically Speaking, Formally Reading Ana Castillo's Sapogonia" 153) which counters the fragmented self. Part three of this thesis is devoted to Castillo's novel So Far from God. This section explores Castillo's literary technique of magical realism within the novel. This technique is used to blur the lines between reality and fiction and arises from a demand for myth "to explain the beginnings which escape history's narrative" (Levinson 26). Castillo re-appropriates the myth of La Llorona, a prominent figure in Mexican and 6 According to the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies website, "The term 'Mesoamerica' refers to a geographical area occupied by a variety of ancient cultures that shared religious beliefs, art, architecture, and technology that made them unique in the Americas for three thousand yearsfrom about 1500 B.C. to A.D.

2011

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 2000

Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 2023

The 2021 book Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth claims that it updates revisionist arguments that have, for decades, documented the importance of slavery in causing the revolution. Revisionist and more recent histories assign a prominent role to slavery in causing the Texas Revolution but either stop just short of claiming that it was the necessary cause or, while arguing or implying that it was a necessary or sufficient cause, usually give full attention to other factors. A cause herein is considered to be the necessary cause of an event when, absent its presence, the event would not occur. A sufficient cause, given a valid necessary cause, is strong enough to bring about the event. A proximate cause occurs at a time close to the event, and while not being necessary or sufficient in itself to cause the event, it can precipitate sufficient causes. Forget the Alamo diminishes in text and tone the importance of other factors while laying out the most severe indictment to date of Texians and their commitment to slavery. Specifically, Forget the Alamo goes beyond revisionist positions to claim that slavery was “the true underlying cause” of the revolution. The words “underlying cause” are problematic. Proximate causes, sufficient causes, or necessary causes are usually connected to specific, related events. In the course of some of these events, underlying currents can become powerfully manifest—making the event a turning point within the dynamic of persistence and change. A principal task, then, is to determine as precisely as possible when, where, and how the turning point events leading up to the Texas Revolution occurred. A preoccupation with an overriding cause can detract from a close examination of the sequence of events and lead to errors of historical anachronism. On one point, especially, the authors of Forget the Alamo force events to conform to their stated “true underlying cause.” Their claim that “the Battle of the Alamo was as much about slavery as the Civil War was about slavery” ignores striking differences between Texas in 1835–1836 and the South as a whole in 1861.

ellipsis, 2013

Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 2020

Journal of Law and Religion, 1986

If any one phenomenon has left a strong mark on both the academic and the publishing scene in Hispanic-American studies during the last fifteen years, it is the unprecedented resurgence of interest in the colonial period, for which various complementary explanations come to mind: in addition to the extremely favorable situation created for colonial studies by the commemoration of the Quincentenary (and the influx of public funds primarily from the Spanish government), the saturation effect triggered by the concentration of scholarship on the narrative "boom" of the 1960s and the 1970s made colonial texts appear as some kind of frontier. These texts became a vast territory to be cleared using the tools provided by structualism (in its Greimassian version, for instance), narratology, the semiotics of image, and reception theory. Subsequently, or in parallel, they were analyzed through methods provided by "post-structuralisrn," critical approaches that were (are) all the more valued because they favored an epistemological and aestletic decentering, a questioning of the literary canon. The discursive practices that had hitherto been disdained or ignored because they either failed to conform to rhetorical and linguistic norms or derived from other semiotic systems, were thus appropriated by the ("literary") Institution.

Forthcoming Book - intro chapter, 2020

Al México del horror, ahora se agrega un canal convertido en fosa. Un catálogo de cuerpos descompuestos, un desfile de familias destroza-das. Una serie de preguntas hundidas en la nada. 13 cuerpos sin identidad. Y como siempre, la no-ción de la impunidad: un Mexico de horror en el que nunca hay responsables. (de Mauleón 2019) Si votamos 32 millones de mexicanos por un cambio y vemos con tristeza que siguen poniendo a los mismos mandos en la federal, en la ministerial , en la Gendarmería, creo que incluso a los mandos militares que tenía Peña Nieto, las cosas no van a cambiar, van a ser peor. Es lo mismo, y peor tantito", José Manuel Mireles (Sin Embargo 2019) "Los mexicanos sufrimos una enfermedad, una furia, un deseo de autodestrucción, de cancelarnos, de borrar-nos, de no dejar huella de nuestro pasado... creemos todavía que es necesario destruir el pasado para disponer del presente.". Guillermo Tovar de Teresa. La historia no estudia el pasado, lo construye. Toda historia nacionales una mitología, y las mi-tologías sirven para estructurar la mente de un pueblo. La historia ha sido un arma, una herramienta política, un discurso psicológico, y eso es así porque siempre se ha escrito desde el poder para legitimarlo. Sin Embargo "Meanwhile, Mexico remains a military oligarchy, and the army sucks up a fourth of the governments' income. Soldiers are everywhere, and their only conceivable function is to hold down the restless populace , afflicted by hunger and choked by a prodigious birth rate, and ready to follow an impassioned orator who promises to lead them out of the wilderness." "Mother Mexico is not feeding her children". (Simpson 1941)

2018

“Looking at Myth in Modern Mexican Literature” in Sandy Rao Mehta (ed), Language and Literature in a Glocal World (Springer, 2018) pp139-160