Hija de la Chingada

"Hija de la Chingada"
"Estas carnes indias que despreciamos nosotros los mexicanos asi como despreciamos condenamos a nuestra madre, Malinalli. Nos condenamos a nosotros mismos. Esta raza vencida, enemigo cuerpo". (Anzaldua, pg 44). Anzaldua statement translates into, "This Indian meat that we despise, us Mexicans so as we despise we condemn our mother, Malinalli. We condemn ourselves. This losing race, enemy body."
Traidora, Traitor…. These were the words I heard from my aunts when La Malinche would come up in their conversations. I was never able to understand why they were negatively impacted by the mention of her name. Gloria Anzaldua in Borderlands/ La Frontera tells us that La Malinche became known as La Chingada -the fucked one. (Anzaldua, 44). Her name brings up many mixed emotions to Chicanas/Chicanos, Mexicanas/Mexicanos, and Pochas/Pochos because she was the interpreter for Hernan Cortes, which is often presented as having led to the destruction of the Aztec empire. In her complexity she represents both the innocent and guilty contradiction that fosters confusion. For some she deserved everything she went through with Cortes because she was a whore who sold her people out, a traitor. Therefore, deserving of the male violence that she may have endured by Cortes. Others challenge the conventional beliefs around La Malinche, and instead place her on a pedestal of honor, a young innocent Indian who was sold into slavery that resulted in the birth of the first Mestiza. Children of Mexico will either uplift her as a Mother or degrade her as La Chingada. This is the binary that Anzaldua traces out in her book, and then teaches us to transcend. Her writing is incredibly relevant to me and to the children of Mexico because it is a chronicle, a retelling, and a transforming of our story and our identity. I am quite literally La hija de la Chingada (daughter of the fucked one) historically, and presently this is my identity.
My mother stands 5 feet tall, dark skinned, with wavy dark hair. She has always been called prieta (dark skinned one). She embodies features of an India (indian). Male culture and white supremacy team up in the Mexican experience forcing women that bear indigenous features to become subservient to males and if one rebels then there is a price to pay. At an early age she worked in a bar as a dancer, which led the men whom surrounded her to sort her into the whore category, deserving of any and all desecrations of her dignity. " la Chingada to make us ashamed of our indian side….. This obscuring has encouraged the virgin/whore dichotomy." (Anzaldua, 53). Without her knowing she was falling into the whore/traitor side of the dichotomy Anzaldua points out has been constructed for Mexican women.
"Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, Happy New Year!" My mom gave me a rambunctious hug and a big Brandy smooch and so began the year 1997. I was smiling but inside I was weeping. For as long as I can recall, this is how my New Year's Eve celebrations felt. Deep down there has always been a hole in my person that my mom couldn't fill. It was the absence of a father. This hole has haunted all of my life. I remember the year 1997 (I was 14 years old). It was the year I felt empowered and determined enough to begin a journey to find my father. My last name is Gonzalez but where does it come from? In many ways this is a journey all the children of colonial violence are on, one way or another. I started to question my mother about my father and she would always respond, "El no quiere nada que ver contingo", which translates to "He wants nothing to do with you". At some point my mom finally reached out to Alvaro Gonzalez and started to ask for child support. He responded with a request for a DNA test. I felt offended but I extended my arm with blind courage and pride. Time passed and he showed up at my mother's doorstep asking to take me out to lunch. I remember my mom being hesitant but she let me go with him and his brother Victor. I had not even started to sip on my Jarrito as he started to apologize to me. "Perdoname Mija pero te tengo que decir que Yo no soy tu Padre." "Sorry Mija but I have to tell you that I am not your biological father." I was quiet while I was staring at him then I asked, "Pues quien es mi padre si yo tengo tu apellido?" "Well then who is my father if I have your last name?" It wasn't long until the moment of truth was before me. My mother nervously said to me, "Cindy, l was abducted and held hostage in a hotel room in Mexico City for four days I was raped by a man. He is your father." Tears raced down my cheeks as anger began to enter my heart. I felt betrayed, incomplete; It became painfully true to me that I was, an "Hija de la Chingada"- literally and metaphorically.
My mother is my people's mother; she is La Malinche, La Chingada. Her truth resembled La Chingada's experience with male culture and white supremacy. She was raped, belittled, and kept in captivity for the pleasures of a man who looked at her and said to himself india puta (indian whore). As a result, of the rape my mother started to despise the indian in her, subsequently leading her to hate herself from the shame that was attached to it. She was bottling up shame and hate in her heart which spear headed the change of her sexuality. She transformed from an undocumented- indigenous looking woman that fell neatly into the virgin/whore dichotomy into a femme-lesbian who hated men for the next twenty years of her life and transcended the binary.
Anzaldua, enlightens us of the classifications that women who are descendants from Mexico fall into according to our culture. "For a woman of my culture there used to be only three directions she could turn: Church as a nun, to the streets as a prostitute, and or to the home as a mother" (Anzaldua, 39). While those are three options they amount to two directions, nuns and moms on the good side and whores on the bad side. My mother like Anzaldua and her writing transcended into a third identity, one which challenges the limits for an undocumented Mexican woman's sexuality by giving taking the power to define her sexuality outside of the norms.
Anzaldua articulates to us how men leave no room for women to have a voice when constructing cultural production. "Dominant paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as unquestionable, unchallengeable, are transmitted to us through the culture. Culture is made by those in power-men." When women challenge, question, or flirt with the virgin/whore dichotomy they face humiliation at the hands of family members who accept those "Dominant paradigms". When the women in Anzaldua's surroundings pressure her to fall into her proper place in the Virgin/whore binary by finding a good man to marry, she is able to speak on the unspeakable subject of their indigenous roots and even embody her Hija de la Chingada identity as an action that reclaims her indigenous side. "Y yo les digo, Pos si me caso, no va ser con un hombre. Se quedan calladitas. Si, soy hija de la Chingada. I've always been her daughter. No tes chingando." (Anzaldua, 39). She encourages us to see La Chingada as a third by means of embracing our indian side while drowning in a culture that tells us to abandon a part of ourselves. Anzaldua points to a war that lives inside of la Mestiza claiming and disowning our Mother who was raped by Cortes and the men that continued to perpetuate male culture.
Anzaldua exposes us to the new knowledge of La Chingada/ Malinche as a metaphor for reclaiming our indian side as a practice of autonomy in a world of cultural domination. Many women of color have similar stories as my mother's, Anzaldua's, and myself, which shows that women continue to be affected by the cultural aspect of our identity, sexuality, and womanhood. I felt I was inheriting the status of an oppressed woman therefore, firmly and resolutely I chose to embody Anzaldua's Hija de la Chingada as an indication of liberation from the shackles of male culture for myself and the forthcoming mothers and daughters de la Chingada. For our Mother's legacy is immortal.



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