Subjugation from Within an Opressed Community

Oppression is a constant theme in Chicano Literature. Audiences have read time and again how an oppressed figure breaks through the chains of subjugation through heroic efforts. Writers, artists, and filmmakers usually depict the oppressed figure gaining insight and overcoming odds of their condition. Socially constructed lines visible through gender, class, and race are usually at fault for the oppressed condition. However, what is also revealed in many Chicano narratives is that the very same social constructs that exploit the oppressed community permeates and causes further stratification within, creating a seemingly endless spiral of subjugation.

It is a difficult task for writers of these narratives to reveal the gravity of how social constructs create further subjugation within the oppressed community.  In utilizing different mediums of storytelling: film and literature, this essay will explore the ways in which the theme of oppression has greater stakes for the oppressed community than what is usually seen on the surface of reality. For the purpose of this essay, the following works will be closely analyzed, compared, and deconstructed: the film Real Women Have Curves directed by Patricia Cardoso adapted from the original play by Joesefina Lopez, Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, and Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders.

            Real Women Have Curves is a film that follows a young, strong-willed Mexican-American woman coming of age named Ana Garcia. Ana is embroiled in conflict from the beginning of the film. The audience immediately gets a sense of division within the family in the opening scene. Carmen, Ana’s mom is “really sick” and wants Ana to “make breakfast for the men.” Ana asks if her sister Estela can do it, but her mom replies that she has too much work in the factory. When it is revealed that it is Ana’s last day of school, Carmen props right up and exclaims in an insidious tone, “ungrateful,” and then incites her struggles with working for the family and raising Ana. Ana then walks off with a following scene of her long trip to her Beverley Hills High School.

In analyzing just the first minutes of the film, the audience already sees a very apparent division, the division between Ana and her family. When education is brought up, Carmen has a reaction that may seem typical to working class families. Education is viewed as a way to advance in society and gain more access to better opportunities, however for Ana’s mother education is an obstacle in the way of Ana’s compliance and place in the Garcia family dynamic. Another important aspect is the distance that Ana has between her family, both in the mentalities of Ana and Carmen and actual distance when she treks across town for her education.

            Carmen’s expectations for Ana seem very oppressive throughout the film, especially when confronting the issues of body image. Carmen continually puts down Ana for being overweight. In the scene where the audience first gets introduced to the family factory, Ana sees a slim dress on a mannequin. Carmen tells her that she will never fit into that. Ana gets defensive and asks, “Why does you always have to be like this?” Carmen replies that she tells her for her own good and then proceeds to put her down for her weight, calling her enormous. One might wonder, as well as Ana as to why Carmen berates Ana continually for her weight? Should a mother not love her daughter unconditionally no matter what she looks like? The answer is simple. Carmen wants Ana to get a man and get married. Carmen is priming Ana to be a compliant and model housewife so that she will follow in her footsteps and one day have a family of her own. Her view isn’t necessarily a unique one. It is somewhat of a ubiquity in Mexican-American, working class households. Success is measured from strong family bonds under a patriarchal roof where women have to meet a requirement in body image as well as a mentality.

            Oppression does not just come from within the family; it can also come from within the Chicano community. It is revealed to Ana as well as the audience the pressures Estela has in keeping up with the bills in the factory. In an attempt to keep the factory, Estela and Ana go see Mrs. Glass to ask for an advance for the dresses. As they exit the elevator and walk up to the [Chicana] receptionist, they are condescendingly informed that they need an appointment to see Mrs. Glass. Just as Ana and Estela are about to leave Mrs. Glass shows up. While Estela is having a hard time to muster up the words to ask for the advancement, Ana takes over and demands an advance. Mrs. Glass responds quite harshly that she can’t pay advances and states to Estela, “I went out on a limb to hire you in the first place because I believe a woman like me should help a woman like you.” Ana then whispers to Estela in Spanish, “She is worse than you said.” Mrs. Glass overheard and reveals that she can not only understand Spanish, but seems to be a fluent speaker.

What is taken away from this short scene is a narrative that reverberates outside of the film into reality. The audience gets a glimpse of the figure Mrs. Glass represents. A Chicana disguised by her name and position. She emanates a powerful feminine role, however she also seems to subjugate and exploit the Garcia family. The message that this scene sends is a subtle yet striking one when considering what is at stake from the oppression and exploitation within the Chicano community.

            In Woman Hollering Creek, the author Sandra Cisneros continues on with the theme of the oppressed figure very intimately. The main character Cleofilas is a woman who lives vicariously through her telenovelas, magazines, and books; a romanticized life full of passion. Before her marriage to Juan Pedro she envisions what her life would be like “en el otro lado, on the other side” (Cisneros 43). She anticipates moving away from her hometown to Seguin, where it is “far away and lovely” and where “she would get to wear nice outfits like the women on the tele” (45). Cleofilas envisions the archetypical married life comparable to what Carmen Garcia envisions for her daughter Ana. Cleofilas is determined to be a model wife and to share her love for her new family. However as the story unfolds, Cleofilas learns that what she longed for is as fictitious as her stories in her telenovelas and books.

As Cleofilas approaches her new neighborhood she finds that her home is sandwiched between two neighbors, “the woman Soledad on the left, the woman Delores on the right” (46). Soledad, which translates to solitude or loneliness, is a woman whose husband has deserted her. Delores, which translates to sorrowful, is a woman whose two sons died in the war and whose husband died shortly after from grief. Both of these characters are significant, as they offer the reader the symbolism and foreshadowing that Cleofilas will endure in a short time. The foreshadowing is represented from the scene Cisneros illustrates here:

The neighbor lady Delores divided her time between the memory of these men and her garden, famous for it sunflowers – so tall they had to be supported with broom handles and old boards; red red cockscombs, fringed and bleeding a thick menstrual color (47).

The significance of this scene is shown, as Cisneros reveals from the color red. The “bleeding a thick menstrual color” acts as the foreshadowing device that the reader will soon discover from Juan Pedro’s beating of Cleofilas; “the lip split and bled an orchid of blood” (47). So far Cisneros has only begun to provide the brutality of an oppressed figure within her marriage. Cleofilas had hopes to escape from her dreary life of her hometown, only to find that her dreams were split open with Juan Pedro’s brutality and subjugation.

            As the narrative progresses, the reader finds that Cleofilas is slipping even deeper into a fully oppressed figure. Her duties as a wife become a performance for her husband and his friends. In the scene at the ice house, Cleofilas accompanies Juan Pedro and his friends:

[Cleofilas] sits mute beside their conversation, waits and sips a beer until it grows warm, twists a paper napkin into a knot, then another into a fan, one into a rose, nods her head, smiles, yawns, politely grins, laughs at the appropriate moments, leans against her husband’s sleeve, tugs at his elbow, and finally becomes good at predicting at where the conversation will lead (48).

This passage reads more like a script of an actor following guided direction. Cleofilas is an ornament to her husband and does not have a voice within the structure of her marriage. However as this scene progresses, the reader gets some explanation as to why there might be such brutality and oppression from the men, and especially Juan Pedro:

Cleofilas concludes each is nightly trying to find the truth lying at the bottom of the bottle like a gold doubloon on the sea floor. They want to tell each other what they want to tell themselves. But what is bumping like a helium balloon at the ceiling of the brain never finds its way out. It bubbles and rises, it gurgles in the throat, it rolls across the surface of the tounge, and erupts from the lips – a belch. If they are lucky, there are tears at the end of the long night. At any given moment, the fists try to speak (48).

This lengthy passage is filled with incredible imagery that guides the reader’s understanding of where the brutality originates. Cleofilas sees the men drowning in their beer searching for an escape or an answer. Like a gold doubloon on the seafloor, the men have little chance to find what they are seeking. They cannot communicate their pain, even if they tried. The formless feelings turn into frustration, and their frustration turns violent. They are oppressed themselves. The men have a working class wage in an oppressive environment and seek truth and answers in alcohol. The anger and brutality redirects onto themselves and often onto women like Cleofilas. Cisneros offers a vivid explanation from the complexities of oppression within the Chicano community.

            As the abuse sustained on Cleofilas gets more and more brutal and the town she lives in begins to reveal its true form of “dust and despair” (50), she begins to miss her father’s home. The town on the US side is “built so that you have to depend on husbands” (51). This male dominated town is a place where a woman has no place of empowerment. The oppressed woman is secluded with no resource for liberty or individualism. Cleofilas has only her books and imagination to liberate her from the oppressed life she is living. However, even then, Juan Pedro continues his abuse by throwing a book at Cleofilas, her book. This hurts even more than the physical pain of having a book lash across her face. The symbolism at play here is that her husband not only abuses her physically, but abuses her outlet to liberate her minds as well. Juan Pedro abuses Cleofilas’ ideas. Juan Pedro believes that there is no need to read and fill her head with silly ideas. Her only escape has been thrown out.

            In perhaps the most intense example of oppression and subjugation from the areas of the US-Mexico border and within the Chicano and Mexican community comes from Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders. This novel is based on factual events that led to the deaths of hundreds of women in Juarez, Mexico. De Alba provides a disclaimer for her readers that give insight as to her motives of writing on the maquiladora murders. She explains that she added a “metaphorical dimension” to the narrative “using the image of American coins, particularly pennies, to signify the value of the victims in the corporate machine; the poor brown women who are the main target of these murders, are, in other words, as expendable as pennies in the border economy” (de Alba vii). The recurring theme of oppression and exploitation is defined from the start. De Alba also uses female protagonists to stress the major issues of an oppressed community and individuals. The narrative follows a woman named Ivon Villa. Like Ana Garcia from Real Women Have Curves, Ivon is characterized as strong-willed who is also at odds with her mother. She is a feminist, lesbian, and a visiting professor at work on her dissertation. It is not surprising that Ivon is the voice for the oppressed considering all her character traits, however these traits are what enables Ivon to break through and navigate the highly dangerous streets of Juarez and her hometown in El Paso safely.

             In the first chapter of Desert Blood, de Alba describes a gruesome scene of a girl in the process of a brutal kidnapping. By opening the narrative in this way, the reader is prepared from the start of the brutality that is endured by the victims of the region. Along with the murders, the novel directly involves the Maquiladoras located in Juarez. In these factories, several female workers are oppressed and exploited from all facets of the male dominated society. The story unfolds as Ivon and her partner Brigit are in want of adopting a baby. Ivon decides that she wants to adopt a baby on the other side of the border, in Juarez. Ivon’s cousin Ximena, arranges for the process of adoption in not the purely legal means. A maquiladora worker named Cecilia is the woman whom Ivon will adopt a baby from. As the plans are set, Ivon, Ximena, and Father Francis make their way to Cecilia’s only to find out that Cecilia has been murdered. When they reach the city morgue where Cecilia is kept, the narrative sheds light onto the attitudes that men possess when dealing with a group of women protesting the violence against women, ““Estas Viejas escandolosas,” the policeman gestured at the protestors over his shoulder. “It’s not a strike, it’s these crazy women wanting attention, that’s all.” He spit at the ground” (44). The reader sees a dismissive male society encapsulated in this policeman and the disrespect he holds for the lives of oppressed woman.

Continuing on into the morgue, Ivon sees a ravaged and lifeless body of the woman that carried her adopted child. In this scene, Cecilia is laid out on a table with several medical examiners dissecting every part of her body. Her flesh is cut out and weighed, which seems to mimic a butcher in a deli cutting up parts of an animal to sell to customers. De Alba then employs her “metaphorical dimension” in this passage:

Norma Flores was collecting the gallstones in a plastic cup. In another plastic cup Ivon noticed something that looked like coins: blackened, corroded coins mixed with pennies (52).

This scene is full of imagery that resounds de Alba’s message of the oppression and exploitation of the female population in the border economy. The coins and pennies represent the low cost of a woman’s life in the society. The medical examiners cut up Cecilia like it is routine. 

Like Ana Garcia’s conflict with her family and her determination to continue on with higher education, Ivon Villa has had a similar history with her mother. After the visit in the morgue, Ivon makes her way to her mother’s home. As she steps into the hearth of the home, the kitchen, she reflects about her past:

She was home, in her mother’s kitchen, where order and cleanliness reigned, where the next thing to be done had already been laid out, the steps clearly indicated – warm the tortillas, make the lemonade, sit down to eat lunch. This is how she’s grown up (64).

The reader gets a visit of Ivon’s past and the conventional future her mother laid out and indicated for her. Her mother was priming her to become a model housewife and mother. However there is great tension between Ivon and her mother because of who Ivon truly is. Ivon brings great shame to her mother as she angrily explains here:

That’s all you do: embarrass me in front of the whole family. It’s not enough that you went away to college and turned into a marimacha with that Women’s Studies degree, or that your father took up drinking again because of you. Now you want to bring a child into that…that immoral lifestyle of yours? ...You should be ashamed of yourself (66).

Just like Carmen Garcia, Ivon’s mother looks down disdainfully on education. What makes it seem worse, however, is that Ivon chose a Women’s Studies degree. It is as though coursework in this field brings greater shame to the mother as she was supposed to be the teacher of how a woman should act in society. The issue of the relationship of a mother and daughter is a pattern seen in many Chicano narratives. The dynamic of Ivon and her mother is nothing new, however it confirms the predominant message of oppression within the oppressed community.

            The exploitation and subjugation of communities and cultures is nothing new to society. It poisons all nations of the world and creates division between insubstantial differences of race, gender, and class. The works that have been analyzed show how social constructs have plagued communities from a microcosmic to macrocosmic social scale. The microcosmic world of Chicano families, like in Real Women Have Curves and Woman Hollering Creek have revealed the true victims of oppression and how social stratification echoes in the Chicano family dynamic. The larger study of society, like in Desert Blood, reveals the very real danger of how far oppression can lead and how many innocent victims it can produce. These works, as well as several others that are also outside of the Chicano Literary genre, are important to consider when attempting to comprehend the real dangers oppression can lead to.

Works Cited

Cisneros, Sandra. "Woman Hollering Creek." Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.    New York: Random House, 1991. 43-56. Print.

De Alba, Alicia Gaspar. Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders. Houston, TX: Arte Publico,  2007. Print.

Real Women Have Curves. Dir. Patricia Cardoso. Perf. America Ferrera and Lupe  Ontiveros. HBO Films, 2002. Online Stream.