Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story by Ruth Behar

"Translated Woman"

by Amatoga Jeremie &

Fritzi Pieper

Ruth Behar (1956-present)

Esperanza the Translated Woman

Borders & Identity

Snake Metaphor

Coraje

Marianismo

Cycles & Mirroring

“You pay for everything in this life”

"Power of Narrative/Narrative of Power"

Who Gets to Write?

In all those years, I had been trying to decide what I thought of Chencha. I couldn’t figure out whether she was a man cross-dressing as a woman or, indeed, as Esperanza and everyone else who knew her seemed to think, just a very “manly woman,” una mujer hombrona or macha. No one described her as a lesbian, a transvestite, or a gay person, categories which seemed nonexistent among the participants of the cult. Since there seemed to be no doubt in anyone else’s mind that she was, indeed, a woman, I finally gave up as irrelevant and simpleminded my desire to know whether she was “really” a female in biological terms. Esperanza told me that Chencha was married twice and that she had once seen her pregnant, though Chencha lost all her pregnancies because of having to take on so many “male” qualities to fight evil (205-206).

• Clifford Geertz' "Burden of authorship"

James Clifford's "Ethnographic authority" (338)

• The Arthur Munby Problem

avoiding reproduction of Victorian power relations

• Payment

• Blindness

“But he’s blind. He’s blind, but not with his eyes closed. His eyes are just all white” (129).

“She is making her crossing vicariously by allowing me to take back her story” (241).

“marianismo [is] the cult of feminine spiritual superiority” (271)

Mother-in-law: “Here, you came to know your obligation toward your husband, nothing else, to carry out the obligation you’ve taken on… ‘Right away she sentenced me’” (64).

• Textualization of a narrative

(Christina Sharpe)

“In spite of all we know, we’re still uneasy. As we approach the border on a lazy Sunday afternoon in late summer of 1989, the two of us start to feel a wave of anxiety. There’s something about being on the border that is unsettling. Something about having your belongings open for inspection. Something about having to declare who you are, what country you owe allegiance to. Something about having to pretend your identity is not already in question” (227).

“…as I become non-Latina for purposes of inclusion and Latina for purposes of exclusion, just the way my comrade is visibly Indian and yet invisibly Indian in Mexican society” (339).

• Ruth Behar received her B.A. in Letters (1977) from Wesleyan University, and her M.A. (1980) and Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology (1983) from Princeton University.

• She resides in Ann Arbor and is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan

• Tenure after receiving the MacArthur “genius” award as the first Latina in 1988

• Influenced by Sandra Cisneros (“House on Mago Street”), Zora Neale Hurston, Clifford Geertz, James Clifford

• Behar and Esperanza meet in 1985 and start working on

Esperanza’s historia

• Translated Woman, the life history and life story of Esperanza

an indigenous Mexican street peddler is published in 1993

Coraje was not simply an emotional state but an illness state that forms part of Mexican women’s realm of suffering and healing […] But in her narrative, coraje is more than an illness state; it becomes a central metaphore for reflecting upon her condition as a woman under patriarchy. Coraje expresses Esperanza’s sense of the wrongness of the violence inscribed on her in the name of patriarchal law (284).

• Translation

As they say, it’s not the men who are to blame. It’s us women who have to take the blame. Knowing the man is married, why do they go around talking to him and doing things with him? ‘I agree. The woman should have been punished, too. She deserved to be punished’ (90).

• Body as history that needs to be healed and historicized.

They say you have to cut out the tongues of serpents,

because they're in league with the Evil One.

The body rots or dissolves into nothing, but the spirit continues to fight. So they say that, if in this world kill a serpent and don't cut out its tongue, in the next world it will turn you in with the Evil One. And your soul, your spirit, will be defenseless. The serpent will say 'In the other life, you killed me, comma, you took advantage of me'. Serpents talk back to you in the afterlife if you killed any of them and didn't cut out their tongues (2).

I’ve made a confession. Now you carry my sins, because it is as if I have been confessing with my comrade instead of with the priest! You will carry my sins now, because you carry them in your head. She lowers her head to a whisper. If you’re thinking about them, you’re carrying them with you…You tell them somewhere ahead, so someone else can carry the burden” (164).

• pedida v. tomada
• fracasar
• historia

“ One learns these things from one’s grandparents, because my mama does the same things. My mama learned from her abuela” (189).

man/woman

husband/wife

mother/daughter

mother/son

individual/collective

U.S./Mexico

anthropologist/narrator

State/Church

poor/rich

inside/outside

• Esperanza; powerless of powerful?

• Gender

She is an “assertive informant who seemed to demand rather than request favors…” (5)

• Spirituality & Religion

• Federal law versus church law

Church: No, Mama. Why did you go and give permission for me to get married at once? And, if he had done something, so what? We wouldn’t have married; we’d be as we were. And if I had a child, or had two, or however many, but if I saw that I was having a bad life, I’d leave him. But I wouldn’t be weighed down by books. Church books! (63)

Discussion Questions

1. How does this book fit in with feminist anthropology?

Can you see parallels within Ciara’s video?

2. What kind of anthropologist is Ruth Behar? Where does she fit in? Which border must she cross?

3. We have discussed the concept of public versus private in this class. What are the different ways in which this concept is characterized in Behar’s ethnography? Please feel free to use examples from Esperanza’s and Ruth’s story.

4. Thinking about the snake metaphor, is cutting the tongue of a serpent permanent? Can a woman have her tongue cut out at different points in her life? How does this apply to Esperanza and Behar?