“I Have Become Terribly Mexicanized”: Intercultural Identification in Elena Poniatowska’s Querido Diego

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“I Have Become Terribly Mexicanized”: Intercultural Identification in Elena Poniatowska’s Querido Diego By Gregory Stephens (2008) [This essay was written as part of the requirements for a Masters of Philosophy in Spanish literature (granted 2007), at the University of West Indies-Mona. The paper was written for a course on Latin American Women Writers taught by Dr. Claudette Williams. I researched and completed the M.A. while I was a Lecturer Cultural Studies and Film at the Department of Literatures in English, University of West Indies-Mona, Kingston 7 Jamaica. I have revised the beginning of the essay, to explain the context in which it was written.]

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“I Have Become Terribly Mexicanized”: Intercultural Identification in Elena Poniatowska’s Querido Diego Abstract: In Querido Diego, Poniatowska’s difficult identification as a Mexican shaped her portrayal of the love of a quasi-historical character, Quiela, for Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Rivera provided Quiela with iconic access to “feeling Mexican,” and Poniatowska revealed her own desire to feel Mexican by speaking through the letters that she imagines Quiela might have written to Rivera. This analysis is grounded within the context of teaching Querido Diego in Jamaica, where knowledge of Mexican culture is minimal. So this essay functions as a meditation on the challenges of intercultural translation. Intercultural identification is seen as transfigurative for participants. Key Words: intercultural, Mexican novel, Diego Rivera, Elena Poniatowska, primitivism, European civilization, indigenous peoples, noble savage, Jamaican culture

My focus on themes of intercultural attraction and repulsion in Querido Diego was shaped by a group reading of this text. This essay was first drafted in late 2004 when I was a recent arrival at the University of the West Indies. I had a doctorate in Communication, but had been transitioning into Latin American Cultural Studies for a decade. This essay served as an entry point to my study of “texts in flight” between the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and the United States, or between Europe and Latin America. My reading is shaped by pedagogical concerns about the lack of previous exposure of Afro-Caribbean students to Mexican culture. I have come to see it as something of an introduction to some key themes in Mexican culture, or European-Latin American relations. I hope readers will be indulgent of the essay’s limitations, and my failure to tease out other complicated patterns of identification which are suggested by Poniatowska’s text, but which are not explored in this essay. College students are taught routinely nowadays to pay close attention to the historical situated-ness of texts, the psycho-biography of authors, the positionality of individual interpreters. They are encouraged to suss out the ideological leanings of various “interpretive communities” (Fish 1980). Such is the contrast between these approaches and prior meaning-inthe-text schools of thought such New Criticism that the post-1960s deconstructions have been called a “revolution” (Bertrens 2001). This “revolution” has made literary and cultural studies a primary source of political critique in the academic world; sometimes it seems the only home to genuinely radical academic thinking, at least in the United States. Yet understanding about the creation, distribution, and reception of texts/ performances has in practice not extended far beyond a small elite who have passed through graduate school. These intellectual revolutions have not done much to introduce cultural or media literacy to a mass audience. They have not cured most of us of “our propensity to see ourselves and the writers that we read as…divorced from socio-economic circumstances” (Bertrens 2001, 81. Audience studies scholarship has set a template regarding the “socio-economic circumstances” of both creators and consumers. In her study of the reception of soap operas, Dorothy Hobson came to this conclusion: “There is no overall intrinsic message or meaning in

3 the work…..It comes alive and communicates when the viewers [or readers/listeners] add their own interpretation” (Hobson 1982, 170). Audience studies emerged as a corrective to the transmission model of communication, or a simple encoding/decoding model of interpretation. This approach is at its best, in my view, when it uses ethnographic methods to give us a clearer picture of interpretation as a collective process. When individuals interpret texts, programs, or music as part of a group, then we are able to see more clearly the strengths and weakness of the “interpretive community” of which they are a part. Interpretation done in collective contexts displays the unique cultural resources of a given community, as well as its own particular ideological or cultural blinders. Reading Elena Poniatowska’s epistolary novel Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela within the context of a class on “Spanish American Women’s Narrative” at the University of West Indies-Mona put the dynamics of group interpretation in a new light. This class was around 95% female, and everyone except for myself was Afro-Jamaican or Afro-Caribbean. In this setting I revisited a recurring theme or aspiration in my work, to highlight intercultural relations (and multi-ethnic audiences) as a blind spot in cultural analysis. My analysis of Querido Diego is part of an on-going effort to suggest, along with scholars such as José Limón (1998), Toni Morrison (1992) and Shelly Fisher Fishkin (1993), that interculturality is every bit as important an element of cultural analysis as the “holy trinity” of race, class, and gender. West Indian students had a hard time understanding just how to categorize, or make sense of, Poniatowska’s mixture of genres. They seemed puzzled by her blurring of the lines between fiction (authorial invention) and the letters of a real-life person, the Russian painter Angelina Beloff. Angelina, A.K.A. “Quiela,” was the common-law wife of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera while the pair lived in Paris during the 1910s. Many readers in the class apparently “resolved the tension by attributing the letters in their entirety to the real Angelina and not to a persona Poniatowska has created,” as John Berry has written (Berry 1998, 48). Consciously, students understood that this was a fictionalized narrative. But in practice, there was a pronounced tendency to read this narrative as a sort of real-life example of “false consciousness” and female dependency. The students were unfamiliar with Mexican culture, and a history of European attraction to Latin American cultures. This hindered an understanding of intercultural dimensions of Beloff’s attraction to and obsessing over Rivera (in Poniatowska’s reimagining). In the absence of such awareness, the students fell back on the two interpretive tools they had at hand. The first was feminist/gender theory, which has generated most of the scholarship on this relatively understudied text. The second was their personal experience in a culture where gender relations are an explosive topic, and there is a great deal of resentment towards Jamaican men—who like Rivera, are often promiscuous lovers and absentee fathers. As a result, students tended to adapt the face value perspective of Quiela’s seemingly compulsive one-way love for Diego as “a desperate attempt by a woman seeking a man to ‘complete’ her.” (Sifuentes-Jauregui 2001). This yearning for completion, when it becomes a compulsive search, is a type of psychological complex that leaves one open to seduction by ideology, Lacan has argued.1 This has been a starting point for a good deal of scholarship about the psychological dependency of women who seek in a man the completeness or fullness they feel they lack. Such a theoretical perspective clearly has utility for a text like Querido Diego. But

4 if readers only debate the degree to which Beloff/Quiela did or did not overcome her infatuation with Diego Rivera, they are missing an incompleteness of a different sort—intercultural--which is crucial for a historically grounded, psychologically and culturally nuanced interpretation. Querido Diego gives us abundant evidence of how, in an intercultural context, this sense of incompleteness, and of looking for completion in other culture, has been a source of various forms of racial mythologies--primitivism and the “noble savage” prominent among them. Before proceeding to my own “intervention,” I should define my own “positionality.” To the women of the class with whom I read Poniatowski, I was a middle-aged American white man. But in familial and cultural terms, I am a long-term resident of what José Limón has called “Greater Mexico.”2 That term suggests that Mexican people and cultures extend far beyond the border. Many parts of Greater Mexico in the U.S., particularly the Southwest, are dominated by Mexican Americans. The term also infers that Mexican and Mexican American culture has had a transfigurative impact on “mainstream” U.S. culture. Mexican culture has certainly deeply influenced me for decades now, so when I read Poniatowski’s fictional account of just what Quiela saw in Diego, I have a great deal of empathy: “todo mi ser sufrió una modificación completa: me mexicanicé terriblemente” (Poniatowska 2001, 41).3 That declaration does not take place until two-thirds of the way through a text that only runs to 65 pages. And the first twothirds of the book does indeed focus primarily on Quiela’s psychological dependency, and her halting efforts to let go of a relationship that no longer nourishes, that she compares to a rotten tooth that needs to be uprooted (38). But from the moment that Quiela confesses to her Mexicanization, an intercultural dimension is introduced to the narrative that should make us read everything that came before in a new light. What does it mean that a fair-skinned Russian woman, one of “las mujeres pequeñas y blancas” (43) drawn to darker men in Paris during the second decade of the 20th century, should say repeatedly: “me siento Mexicana” (50). Or that Rivera reminds her of how her friends have also observed this “terrible” Mexicanization, such as when Zadkin tells her: “Se ha mexicanizado usted tanto que ha olvidado cómo hacer el té” (47). What would lead a European woman to let go of her own cultural roots to that extent? Both Beloff and Rivera were exiles from the revolutions of their respective countries during the 1910s. Potianowska’s Quiela writes Diego that her family was a “fuente del liberalism y del radicalismo en Rusia.” Her parents pushed her towards independence and artistic creativity. “Me enorgullece haber sido una de las mujeres avanzadas de mi tiempo” (59). And what did advanced, creative European women of this time do to prove just how liberated they were? Often they took darker-skinned men—especially African American or Latino artists—as lovers, and prided themselves on being muses to an uprising of creativity that seemed earth-changing on many fronts—personally, artistically, politically. This Quiela, speaking as much for Poniatowska as to Diego Rivera, describes her first encounter with Rivera in La La Rotonde as love at first sight. The comments of her friends and other observers are an accurate representation of the mindset of monied Europeans in that era: “Oi a Zadkin decir: ‘He aqui al vaquero mexicano’ y otros exclamaron: ‘Voilá l’exotique, me interesé en ti.” And it is on seeing Diego while hearing this commentary that Quiela takes an interest in Diego, dressed for the part in a wide-brimmed Mexican hat (60).

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Her friend Zadkin, seeing Diego and Quiela together, notes their “funny” contrast. He uses racial terms that underlay much of European interest in people from the colonies, Africa, Asia, America. Zadkin describes Rivera as “el salvaje mexicano,” and Beloff as a “criatura pequeña y dulce envuelta en una leve azulosidad” (60). Diego’s disheveled appearance awakens her mothering instinct. But the “magnetic atmosphere” around him inspires a sense of ownership: this was a charisma that “others discovered later,” but she feels she discovered it first. Poniatowska, ventriloquating through Beloff, is giving voice to major current of 20th century culture. After representations of the Mexican revolution became institutionalized—with Rivera’s murals the centerpiece—there arose “an enormous vogue of all things Mexican” among Euro-Americans (Delpar 1992). Poniatowska’s imaginative recreation of Beloff’s fascination with Rivera shows this phenomenon in its early, primarily interpersonal phase. This “vogue” was also an important psychological dimension of Poniatowska’s life, as a French-born blue-blooded Polish émigré to Mexico. After Diego had returned to Mexico, Quiela’s friend Élie Faure observed how Diego’s departure had left a vacuum. They (Europeans) needed his “manantial de leyendas de un mundo sobrenatural.” Why? Because “[la creatividad y] el dinamismo de espíritu habían muerto en Europa” and they needed new myths (42). It was because Rivera represented this new man, acting out new myths, that Quiela “fell into ecstasy” in his presence. This refrain in European relations with what we would now call “developing nations” dates at least to Rousseau’s “noble savage,” who, because he was closer to nature (or the world God had created, before humans overdeveloped it), was capable of regenerating Europeans. This thinking played out in the early 20th century on several fronts. Picasso re-invented his artistic career and started a profitable fashion (Cubism) by “assimilating” African art styles.4American jazz artists came to Paris en masse, and Europe began dancing to their rhythms. Some major thinkers, such as the psychologist C.G. Jung, laid out a fierce critique of European spiritual bankruptcy, and looked for healing powers, or a cultural completion, in the cultures and spirituality of African, Asia, and the indigenous cultures of the Americas.5 European writers such as D.H. Lawrence spent a great deal of time close to Indians or indigenous peoples, and tried to refashion their art by identifying with the “savagery” and vitality of native cultures. Quiela’s rapturous description of Diego is typical of the racial romanticism of that era (and to some degree, our own). She conflates man and country: Diego, like Mexico, is “recién nacido.” Without the weight of a deadened tradition, “cada uno de tus ademanes es creativo; es nuevo, como si fueras un recién nacido” (42). Quiela’s Russian friend Bakst ironized: “los salvajes no están contaminados por nuestra decadente ci-vi-li-za-ción.” He then warned Quiela: “Ten cuidado porque suelen tragarse de un bocado a las mujeres pequeñas y blancas” (43). It should be emphasized: there was a market for enactments of the dynamic “savage.” If the Europeans were buying, a great number of these darker-skinned others—African Americans, people from Latin America and Asia—were selling. Diego Rivera was one of many nonEuropeans playing this role. He played it to the hilt, and the women of Europe in particular bought the act wholesale. He represented vitality, sexuality, and artistic regeneration to them.

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In the 11th letter of Poniatowska’s book (November 2, 1921), it becomes clear how fully Rivera himself subscribed to racial mythologies, and how important this was both in attracting Quiela, and in wounding her. At first she feels his fascination with her fair skin is positive. But then the unflattering comparisons begin: “Aquí todos son rostros claros sobre fondos más oscuros. En mi país todos son rostros oscuros sobre fondos claros” (56). Rivera, from a country which claimed to be almost entirely mestizo or of mixedethnicity, was dismissive of a Spanish mulatto named Juan Gris. “Lo que tiene de bueno es lo que tiene de Negro, lo malo es lo que le queda de blanco” (57). What follows is a diatribe that shocks and hurts Beloff. Rivera says, in rough translation, that the haughty French look down on Latin Americans, and yet “ya quisieran los pálidos, los arrugados europeos, caminar con la gracia felina del trópico; que un rayo de sol incendiara a coloreara su piel desabrida y lacia. ¡Qué vieja, qué polvosa, qué herrumbre la de Europa, Angelina!” (57). Quiela tries not to take it personally: after all, during the bloodbath of the WWI years, it was hard to have a positive assessment of Europeans. But his words wound all the more for the element of truth they contain. They wound even deeper, perhaps, because they cut to the quick of the racial mythologies that have drawn Quiela to Diego in the first place. When Poniatowska’s Quiela concludes her next-to-last letter by referring to her “cabeza herida” (61), which she still instinctively wants to place on Diego’s shoulder, this is not simply the broken heart of a spurned lover. Quiela’s wounded head is a much deeper wound. When our “Spanish American Women’s Narrative” class read aloud the section where Quiela describes Diego as “a God” (among other things), this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. “Tú has sido mi amante, mi hijo, mi inspirador, mi Dios, tú eres mi patria; me siento mexicana” (50). At this moment there were loud exclamations of disgust, disappointment, and dismay. The passage in which this woman describes Rivera as a personal deity was profoundly offensive to many women in the class who, as their instructor pointed out, were beneficiaries of the feminist revolution. But after hearing this confession, many could no longer take Quiela seriously. They felt she no longer merited their respect. She did not fill their need for a female hero whose independence from irresponsible men was complete. But again, it’s both a buyer’s and a seller’s market. This notion of a somehow God-like savage artist is both performed, and consumed. Expressing his abhorrence at industrialization, Rivera observed: “En mi país la gente se sienta a comer con una actitud hierática y pausada como deben hacerlo los dioses” (57). Other sections in which Quiela describes the Mexican sun convey a sense, undoubtedly reinforced by Rivera, that Mexico was a magical country where people lived closer to the Gods, or lived like God had intended for people to live. With these cultural and psycho-social elements of their relationship in view, we may be able to interpret Quiela’s reaction to the loss of her child with Diego in a new light. In the seventh letter (11-29-1921), Quiela recalls how completely the creative process had filled her life, long before she met Diego, a notoriously compulsive artist. She saw everything as a “prospective picture.” Even children drew her attention not as individual kids, but as a part of a sketch (33). But now that their son Dieguito has died, “Ahora todo ha cambiado.” “No sólo he

7 perdido a mi hijo, he perdido también mi posibilidad creadora” (34). Everything has changed for Quiela/Beloff not only because, in literal terms, she now sees the individuality of children. Motherhood has also expanded her concept of creativity. And the loss of this particular child, the son of Diego Rivera, is the loss of the physical extension of her desired cultural union with Mexico. A mixed-“race” child would have represented to Beloff the possibility of bridging the enormous distance between her Russian roots and the Mexican culture of her beloved. (Think of an archetypal story from this era, the dream of C.G. Jung & Sabina Spielrein of raising a hero-child who would bridge the gap between Aryan Europe and its Semitic other) (Kerr 1993). With the loss of Dieguito, the possibility of physically relocating to Mexico, and having a lasting claim on Diego’s heart, becomes remote. This is undoubtedly part of the reason why, in the sections immediately following Quiela’s assertion that “everything has changed” (beginning with letter #8, January 2, 1922), she begins to make explicit the intercultural and psycho-social dimensions of her relationship with Rivera. And she begins to try to come to terms with the “sufrimiento inútil” it has caused (38). At this point we should ask John Berry’s question: “Who really is writing the letters, and to whom is she writing?” (Berry 1988, 47). The first is primarily Poniatowska, of course, using a slender group of excerpts of Beloff’s actual letters.6 As to her primary audience, Poniatowska’s correspondence with Berry is revealing. The author told Berry that the writing was spontaneous, “un chorro que salió una mañana cuando yo me sentía la esposa de Diego Rivera” (48). This points to personal reasons why Poniatowska confessed that she had come to regret publishing this book, aside from the “great confusion” it had caused among readers and critics (47). The instinctual manner in which this text was composed, with the author imagining herself as the abandoned spouse, indicates that on a psychological level, this was a response to Diego Rivera, whom Poniatowska had interviewed as journalist in 1957. In fact, as Pierina Beckman points out, Rivera is “un nombre recurrente en muchas de las obras de la autora” (a recurring presence in Poniatowska’s work) (Beckman 2002). He also appears also in La piel del cielo and Tinísima. There is an element of “repeat to complete” here. One must bear in mind that when Poniatowska met Rivera, she was a young journalist who was still seeking a sense of belonging in Mexico. Spanish was her second language, and although her mother was Mexican, her father was Polish royalty. Poniatowska had to work at dominating Spanish, and at acquiring a sense of belonging in Mexico, her adopted country. Facing the legendary Diego a year before his death, the young Poniatowska encountered “one of the keys of 20th-Century Mexican culture,” as Carlos Monsiváis (1995) notes in a commentary on Querido Diego. One of Rivera’s biographers, Gladys March, noted that Rivera was a self-mythologizing creature who “transformed the history of Mexico into one of the great myths of our century.” Poniatowska was of course clearly aware of this mythic stature, but as an incipient feminist, she responded to him with “simultaneous attraction and repulsion.”7 Poniatowska published her two-part interview in the 1969 book Palabras Cruzadas. She came to Rivera feeling a bit afraid him him, “like all of Mexico,” she noted, but left the first interview feeling primarily charmed. However, she described him as an “ogre” after their second

8 interview, and seems to have been offended when Rivera told her that her privilege and lack of experience limited her understanding of things Mexican. But she later sought to pay homage to Rivera in a way that reveals how she, Rivera, and Poniatowska’s Quiela all re-defined themselves through a relationship to indigenous Mexico (or representations of that Indian Mexico). "El Diego que nos conviene es el del gran corpachón que un dia volvió la cabeza y se encontró con el indio” (Poniatowska 1961, 64). This image performs two functions. First, it presents Diego as an iconic, monumental figure, like those enormous Olmec heads on the Gulf coast of Mexico. But second, despite the myth of Diego as being closely identified with Mexico’s indigenous roots, his rise to fame through the adaptation of Indian themes was in some ways an acquired fashion. Of course in Europe he was following the Cubist fashion, and it was only after his return to Mexico, when the “institutionalized revolution” began making funds available to artists like Rivera, that he began emphasizing indigenous cultures as a cornerstone of Mexican-ness. There are some parallels between Rivera’s career trajectory and that of Poniatowska. She also came to Mexico from Europe. She emphasized giving a voice to the voiceless in Mexico. She also in a delayed fashion, and through the encounter with the Indian “other,” discovered her own Mexican-ness. Before that, Poniatowska was known as the “red princess.” She grew up surrounded by servants and a life of privilege unknown to most Mexicans. This created both a link with the lower classes (the servants taught her Spanish) but also a consciousness of a great social distance that she would spend decades trying to bridge. As one literary marker of that long transition, Bruce-Novoa may be close to the truth when he writes that "Poniatowska's fascination with Beloff, and her recreation of her letters, have been implicitly seen as a nostalgic remnant of Poniatowska's own elitism” (Bruce-Novoa 1990, 118). But certainly Poniatowska’s own commentary indicates that she experienced a certain “transference with Angelina,” as Berry notes (1988, 49). She herself was one of “las mujeres pequeñas y blancas” that “savages” like Rivera were accustomed to gulp down. She seems to have been conscious of the need to resist that attraction. The repulsion that the resistance and critical distance inspired give her important insights into herself, Rivera, and Mexican culture. In the decade after interviewing Rivera, Poniatowska developed a sense of belonging (as a woman and as a Mexican) through the interviews with a rebellious Mexican woman, published in Hasta no verte Jesus mío (1969). Poniatowska has called her rather conflicted relationship with Josefina Borquez, A.K.A. “Jesusa Palancares,” the heroine of the novel, “the fundamental meeting of my life.” Up to age 15, she has confessed, she “wanted to be a man.” It was through interactions with this poor, but intensely independent Mexican woman that Poniatowska came to the realization that “because of her I also love being a woman” (Poniatowska 1991, 87-88). This same relationship also finally provided Poniatowska with a somewhat vicarious sense of national identity. She recalled how her grandparents and great-grandparents had left her with the conviction, “I don’t belong.” But she drew strength from the interviews with poor, independent women. As she meditated on Jesusa’s words, “Lo que crecía…era el ser mexicana; el hacerme mexicana; sentir que Mexico estaba adentro de mi y que era el mismo que el de la

9 Jesusa…..Una noche…después de identificarme largamente con la Jesusa…pude decirme en voz baja: ‘Si yo pertenezco’.”8 Poniatowska experience a psychological transference with Angelina Beloff, imagining herself to be Rivera’s wife, even, perhaps because she too had experienced “el deseo de ser otro” (the desire to be the other). As Antonio Vera Leon (1992) has pointed out, this is a characteristic of much of testimonial writing. In Poniatowska’s case, it was a uniquely personal example of compulsion to empathize with and give voice to the voiceless. She has repeated to complete this theme precisely because her outsider status, and her privileged background, had left her with a sense of incompleteness that romantic love or artistic success alone could not fill. Poniatowska’s revisioning of Beloff’s unrequited love for Rivera cannot be a merely interpersonal love story. It’s also about Poniatowska’s attraction and repulsion towards what Rivera represented (self-mythologizing; womanizing; achieving fame by “stealing” or assimilating words or images from indigenous Mexicans).9 More broadly, the text provides a window on two forms of over-determined intercultural relations--between Europeans and their “others,” and between elite Mexicans and indigenous Mexicans. Mexican Indians are held up as markers of authenticity, even as their exclusion from mainstream Mexican politics and culture continues to cause political instability and economic disruption. If this key text in Poniatowska’s “self-making” as a woman and as a Mexican cannot be understood without the feminism she has publicly espoused, neither can its deeper resonances be revealed without a knowledge of and tying together of several other domains. These would include: the Mexican revolution and the institutionalization and commercialization of arts representing the revolution, both for consumption at home and abroad; the cultural dynamics of Russian émigrés and other immigrants in Paris in the early 20th century, and then a whole history of intersecting projections between Europeans and their so-called “primitive” others. By creating a text that combines an indirectly feminist critique of female dependency, along with a portrait of the racial mythologies that underlie many inter-cultural love affairs, Poniatowska sheds new light on testimonial literature. It is the aspiration of testimonial writing “to create a presence from an absence.”10 It is a given in this genre that “If the beloved were present, there would be no need to write,” as Linda Kauffman notes (1986, 17). But in intercultural contexts, the object of romantic love is not only the beloved, but the culture (or imagined culture) of the lover. It is this culture, as much or more than the lover, which represents the hope for psychological and spiritual completion for the partner who enters the relationship with a sense of cultural inadequacy. Despite the problematics of intercultural testimonials, one should not underestimate the degree to which human love animates the intercultural variant of “creating a presence from an absence.” The urge to give voice to the voiceless, or to represent the previously excluded, is filled with pitfalls, just as in possessiveness and other infections of interpersonal love. But this urge to reach beyond ourselves, whether with another human, with nature, or another culture, often calls out what is great in the human spirit. I know that by trying to explain European-Mexican relations to Jamaican women who had little previous exposure to this phenomena, I saw a richness in Poniatowska’s text that would probably have been less evident to me as an individual reader, outside the process of collective interpretation.

10 ENDNOTES 1

Jacques Lacan, Escrits: A Selection, translated Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 2-3. Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (Routledge, 1990). 2 José Limón, American Encounters. See also Gregory Stephens, “Monolingualism and Racialism as ‘Curable Diseases’: Nuestra América in the Transnational South,” Globalization with a Southern Face, ed. James Peacock & Harry Watson (University of North Carolina, 2004). 3 Hereafter quotations from this edition of Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela are cited in the text, parenthetically. On the concept of transfiguration, see Gregory Stephens, “‘What’s become of our Bliss’: Transracialism and Transfiguration in Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth.” Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology 30:1 (June 2002). 4 Rivera also fell sway to Cubism during his decade-long tenure in Paris. Asked later why he had dabbled in this fashion so long, he response was brutally frank: “por pendejo.” SifuentesJauregui, “Loss, Identification and Heterosexual Tendencies” (2001). 5 Jung de-centered Europeans as “only a tiny fraction of humanity, living mainly on that thickly populated peninsula of Asia which juts out into the Atlantic, and calling themselves ‘cultured’.” (Collected Works Vol. 7: 204). Jung opposed “that megalomania of ours which leads us to suppose… that Christianity is the only truth, and the white Christ the only Redeemer.” “Psychotherapists or the Clergy,” in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Dell, 1933). Jung acidly observed that “the white race is not a species of Homo sapiens specially favored by God.” “Psychotherapy and a Philosophy of Life” (Collected Works Vol. 16: 82). 6 Poniatowska claims that she primarily based her imagined letters on information culled from Bertram Wolfe’s biography La fabulosa vida de Diego Rivera (Querido Diego, 67). But she apparently had access to a broader range of sources. See Hortensia R. Morrell, “Crossed words between the lines: the confusion of voices in the love soliloquy of Elena Poniatowska’s Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela,” Journal of Modern Literature (September 2001). 7 Diego Rivera with Gladys March, My Art, My Life: An Autobiography (Citadel Press, 1960; reprinted Dover, 1992). Quoted in Hortensia Morell, “Crossed words between the lines.” 8 Elena Poniatowska, “Hasta no verte Jesus mío,” in Vuelta 24 (1978). Re: Poniatowska’s gradual embrace of womanhood and Mexican-ness in Jill Kuhnheim, “Redefining marginality: Dis-identification in Hasta no verte Jesus mío,” Romance Quarterly Vol. 24 (1995). 9 The way Poniatowska recorded and reshaped Jesusa’s words was often against her will: “I had the feeling I was stealing her words.” Kimberle Lopez interprets their relationship as “a sort of cultural cannibalism.” Poniatowska admits: "Me sentía fuerte de todo lo que no he vivido." Lopez, “Internal colonialism in the testimonial process.” Poniatowska, “Hasta no verte Jesus mío,” in Vuelta 24 (1978), 10. On Jesusa’s unreliability as a narrator, see Claudia Williams, “Subtextuality in Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío,” Hispania 77:2 (May 1994). Re: the way in which fair-skinned Mexicans (and more broadly Latin Americans) have achieved fame by claiming to give voice or representation of the underprivileged (especially indigenous peoples), I am thinking of a trajectory that runs from José Martí, to Frida Kahlo, to Che Guevara, to the Zapatistas in contemporary Mexico, with the fair-skinned Subcomandate Marcos providing much of the structure and terminology for indigenous autonomy. 10 presence/absence: Jean Rousset, "Une forme litteraire: le roman par lettres," Forme et signification: Essais sur les structures litteraires de Corneille a Claudel (Jose Corti, 1962), 63. ["A Literary Form: The Letter Novel," Form and Meaning: Essays on Literary Structures from Corneille to Claudel]. Quoted in Hortensia Morell, “Crossed words between the lines.”

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