Hungry Women: Borderlands Mythos in Two Stories by Helena Maria Viramontes

"The Hungry Woman" In the place where the spirits live, there was once a woman who cried constantly for food. She had mouths in her wrists, mouths in her elbows, and mouths in her ankles and knees. "She can't eat here, said the other spirits. "She will have to live somewhere else." But up above, there was only the empty air, and to the right and to the left and in front and behind, it was just the same. In those days the world had not been created. Nevertheless, there was something underneath that seemed to be water. How it had got there nobody knew. "If we put her below," they though t, "then perhaps she will be able to satisfy her hunger." No sooner had the thought occurred than the spirits (Quetzalcoatl and Texcatlipoca) seized the woman and dragged her down to the water. When they saw that she floated, they changed into snakes, stretching over her in the form of a cross, from right arm to left leg and from left arm to right leg. Catching her hands and feet, they squeezed her from all four directions, pushing so hard that she snapped in half at the waist. "Now look what we've done," they said, and not knowing what else to do, they carried the bottom halfback to the spirit place. "Look," they cried. "What's to be done with this ?" "What a shame," said the other spirits. "But never mind. We'll use it to make the sky." Then, to comfort the poor woman, they all flew down and began to make grass and flowers out of her skin. From her hair they made forests, from her eyes, pools and springs, from her shoulders, mountains, and from her nose, valleys. At last she will be satisfied, they thought. But just as before, her mouths were everywhere, biting and moaning. And still she hasn't changed. When it rains, she drinks. When the flowers shrivel, when trees fall, or when someone dies, she eats. When people are sacrificed or killed in battle, she drinks their blood. Her mouths are always opening and snapping shut, but they are never filled. Sometimes at night, when the wind blows, you can hear her crying for food. --Aztec creation myth In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza Gloria Anzaldda describes the Chicano/a experience as one of ambivalence and unrest, "the lifebloods of two worlds merging to form a third country--a border culture" (3). Because it sustains a gaze that is doubled, ambiguous, neither inside nor outside the system, this border culture is often charted as a danger zone or denied in melting pot myths of nationalism. Like the hungry woman, a figure that can be traced from Aztec mythology through Chicana folklore, this third country will not be silenced or contained. Challenging the discrete boundaries invoked by American nationalism, the borderlands act as a site of agency and transformation in Chicana literature. Here, "[T]he trope of border culture is not thus simply another expression of postmodern aesthetic indeterminacy," as Juan Flores and George Yudice explain, "It corresponds to an ethos under formation; it is practice rather than representation of Latino culture" (60-61). Helena Maria Viramontes employs this practice in two of her short stories from The Moths collection, "The Broken Web" and "Cariboo Cafe." In these two stories, the narrative design illustrates the experience of cultural hybridity as it exposes and critiques structures of domination in Chicano/a border culture. Fragmenting temporality, place, memory and voice, Viramontes's narratives inscribe the ways that various oppressions interact in situated contexts. My reading of these two stories examines how the figure of the hungry woman enacts these configurations of difference, suggesting what Anzaldda terms "a borderlands consciousness." I preface my examination of Viramontes's work with an discussion of what I term the mythos of the hungry woman. As women who will not be satisfied or contained, the Chicana mythic figures, la Llorona, la Malinche, and la Virgen de Guadalupe allegorically inform Chicana literature. …