Multilingual Aesthetics and the Limits of Chicano/a Identity in Margarita Cota-Cárdenas' Puppet

In Margarita Cota-Cardenas' Puppet: A Chicano Novella (1985), the protagonist Petra "Pat" Leyva is relentlessly plagued by what she perceives to be her inability to embody an authentic Chicana self. Pat's desire for authenticity belies her role as a single mother of two girls who holds down two jobs as an instructor of Chicano/a literature and Spanish at a community college and a part-time secretary at a construction company, for the Chicano/a identities that she embraces are extremely reductive. These identities depend upon a romanticized notion of marginalized communities, revolving around conceptions of the working-class laborer, feminist political activist, and selfless wife and mother at the core of a nuclear family. Moreover, Pat associates her feelings of betrayal of her community with some of the most iconic symbols of Chicano/a and Mexican culture, like Cesar Chavez, La Llorona, and La Malinche (also known as Marina or Malintzin). Pat's identification with La Malinche (93), the indigenous translator and lover of the Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortes, who is legendarily known as both the mother of the Mexican nation and as its quintessential betrayer, is particularly fraught; this identification leads her to assume the dichotomous role of female creator and destroyer as she struggles to find her place in her community of friends and family. As a result, Chicano/a identities are impossible to fulfill in the novel, and ultimately reinforce the production of impervious myths and icons of Mexican and Chicano/a identity. Despite Pat's desire for an authentic and immutable Chicano identity, her anxiety also reveals resistance to such strict conceptions of identity. Perhaps the clearest example of the resistance and tension evident in Puppet is the way that the novel appears to promote fixed Chicano/a identities, yet bursts with multilingual tricks and slips that challenge the limits of identity at every turn. The novel deviates from the now dominant mode of hybrid identities and liminal, transnational spaces within much Latino/a and Chicano/a cultural production, evident in well-known texts such as Gloria Anzaldua's influential Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) or Guillermo Gomez-Pena's The New Worm Border (1996). Instead, through a radical interrogation of language and translation, Puppet provides a critical perspective on the ongoing struggle between fluid and essentialist Chicano/a identities. Throughout much of the novel, Pat persists in her desire for a fixed and authentic Chicano/a identity; yet Puppet constantly challenges the institutionalization of identity through this interrogation of language. Cota-Cardenas' novel both rejects the institutionalization of rigid Chicano/a identities and demonstrates a desperate nostalgia for authenticity, fixedness, and monolingualism. While contradictory subjectivities and in-between spaces are explicitly rejected by most of the characters in the novel--especially by Pat herself--the language, form, and style of the novel explode strict boundaries at every turn, symbolically reflecting the transnational condition of Chicano/as in the United States. Instead of perceiving the contradictory representation of identity in Puppet as a marker of stagnation or hopelessness, we should interpret it as a matter of simultaneity and possibility, in which Chicano/as inhabit multiple languages and national identities even as they may occasionally be excluded by them. The secret is to interpret exclusion not as abjection, but as another element of the transformative potential of contradictory Chicano/a identities. Likewise, by emphasizing apparent flaws such as repetition, mispronunciation, misunderstanding, colloquialism, and language mixing, the linguistic games in Puppet privilege flexible identities by revealing each person's capacity to shift between the poles of inclusion and exclusion. This language play also rearticulates myths and icons frequently associated with Chicano/a identity. …