Debra Blake’s Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art is a reading that examines the way Chicana and Mexican women have reimagined cultural symbols to negotiate and contest the individuals that have degraded them. Women within these particular communities completely revert the negative connotations attached to these prominent figures in order to promote self-empowerment and agency within a patriarchal-rooted society.
A prime example from the text that illustrates how Chicana and Mexican women have altered the image and notion of cultural images is rooted in Malintzin Tenepal, otherwise known as La Malinche. Within Chapter 1 of her book, Debra Blake states, “La Malinche disrupts the notion of conquest and resistance as male-gendered activities by inserting a female presence into the male homopolitical relations between the Spaniards and the Mexica and among the indigenous factions” (Blake 43). Once the interpreter and sexual subject of Hernán Cortés, Malintzin Tenepal to this day is seen as the scapegoat for Mexico’s defeat to the Spanish, especially by men. However, Chicana and Mexican women have completely shifted the rhetoric and perception of La Malinche through art. No longer painted out to be the subservient translator of Cortés, La Malinche has been reconstructed to epitomize a self-reliant woman who combated the chains of patriarchal domination exhibited by Spain, Mexico, and the Catholic church.
By connecting visual representations to Chicana and Mexican culture, memories of the past are reimagined into contemporary icons, ultimately dismantling the stigmatizations that target these particular women. Cultural expression through art forms serve as catalysts for not only the amplification of Chicana and Mexican identity in unchartered territories, but also the expansion of horizons within the artistic domain.
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