Myth, Ritual, and the Predation Hypothesis in the Work of Terri de la Peña and Kleya Forté-Escamilla

In “The Ultimate Rebellion: Chicana Narratives of Sexuality and Community” (2003), Katherine Sugg evokes the historically-loaded figure of a “New Malinche.” This mythic construction is usually embodied by a white woman... [ view full abstract ]

In “The Ultimate Rebellion: Chicana Narratives of Sexuality and Community” (2003), Katherine Sugg evokes the historically-loaded figure of a “New Malinche.” This mythic construction is usually embodied by a white woman construed as a threat to traditional patriarchal narratives of la familia because of the possibility of assimilative, traitorous, same-sex romance between historically conquering and conquered peoples (140). The critic uses Terri de la Peña’s novel Margins (1992), among others, to explore contemporary “libidinal links” between Anglo and Chicana women, but suggests that the text “produces an insistently negative portrayal of white women, and particularly white lesbians and would-be lesbians” (144). Sugg critiques a narrow “tendency of ‘ethnic queers’ to group into a coherent identity that separates itself most emphatically from white queers and white culture in general” (144). She also looks suspiciously at a “logic of inclusion [of Chicana lovers] and expulsion [of white lovers]” as it relates to political and personal formation because this model supposedly replicates traditional, heterosexist, male-dominated paradigms of community, belonging, and home (148).

My paper seeks to test this ostensibly “anti-white” hypothesis in de la Peña’s work as well as that of Chicana writer Kleya Forté-Escamilla. In the latter’s short story collection The Storyteller with Nike Airs, and Other Barrio Stories (1994), what is discernible in such stories as “2 Rock Blues” and “The Painter and the Vampire” is a pattern of attraction by Chicana characters to predatory, non-reciprocal, or otherwise problematic white women. While the protagonists are not completely in thrall to these siren-like figures, neither are they comfortable with them. I argue that instead of any “New Malinche” figure, Forté-Escamilla engages the myth of the vampire, one that has roots in Mayan culture and more recently in characterizations of the bruja, tlahuelpuchi (in Mexico), and the less menacing (but no less powerful) pan-Hispanic curandera archetype. While critic Victoria Amador (2013) has explained that de la Peña’s story “Refugio” features a Latina vampire who eventually uses her gifts “for the greater good” (16), Forté-Escamilla reverses the script to suggest that the Anglo woman—not the woman of color—is the vampire. The oppositionality of this paradigm is tested by the existence of mediating powers, usually other Chicanas, women of color, or spiritually gifted observers, who do not necessarily bring the protagonist closer to lovers from her own ethnic communities, but teach her about why she over-invests in those who fracture or diminish her own self-certainty and self-worth.