meXicana encounters book review

Rosa Linda Fregoso’s meXicana encounters is a comprehensive study of how the dominant narratives of American history, culture and male perspective interact and conflict with the ‘counternarratives’ of Mexicanas and Chicanas on the Mexican-American border. Her book’s own narrative revolves around the idea of visible and invisible realities, an idea which goes hand in hand with the main theme of narrative and counternarrative.

The book begins by examining the visible and invisible realities within traditional Mexican culture, with the visible reality encapsulating the public sphere from which women are traditionally barred. Fregoso uses the killing of women in Ciudad Juárez as a way to illustrate the idea that women must stay hidden within the private sphere, with any transgression carrying with it the threat of retaliatory male violence of which the women themselves are then “primarily responsible” (4). This narrative, (used in the documentary Maquila: A tale of two Mexicos) combines with a globalization narrative (Performing the Border) in a way that threatens to absolve the patriarchal state of wrong doing. However, it is combated by the Ni una más and Voces sin Eco campaigns, which seek to give female victims and relatives a voice. Fregoso also uses the counternarrative found in Paulina (1997) to make visible the violence against woman in both the private and public sphere and the ways in which woman fight back.

Fregoso next shows how Mexican American experience and history have been hidden within the dominant Anglo-American history, wherein Chicanos are represented as bandits, degenerate half-breeds and foreigners. This dominant, visible history is so persuasive than even in Lone Star (1996), a film that supposedly seeks to celebrate diversity and minority participation, “often obliquely filter[s] its vision … through a white, benevolent, patriarchal gaze.” (49). Fregoso illustrates how stereotypes of Mexicans (seen in films such as Red Girl, 1908) were used to justify dispossession of Mexican land and the racial violence caused by the fear of miscegenation. “Mexican visibility epitomized, materially and literally, the extinction of a race whose privilege is based on whiteness.” (136) Fregoso also explains how general racism has led to a “gag order [put] on Chicana feminists” (32) by male activists who fear that their narratives will read like outcries against Chicano masculinity and so reinforce negative Chicano stereotypes held by the dominant culture.

These historical stereotypes were further spread throughout American culture by dime novels and films such as Licking the Greasers (1914), which also served to replace true Mexican American history. Fregoso reflects on her struggle to recover official accounts of the history remembered by her grandmother, “The Chicana librarian is startled by my request. ‘There are no books in the library about Mexican American businesses.’ she whispers to me.” (160) Although official accounts seem lost, Fregoso counters the history of Mexican Americans as gangsters, work hands and cheap labor with the remembrances of her grandmother and her entrepreneurial great uncle.

Personally, I found this book highly accessible and interesting. It has provided a perspective that I have not yet encountered and one that I would like to learn more about. I especially enjoyed the idea of “forgetting the Alamo,” since I was also spoon fed the story of brave Davy Crockett and the rest of them in Elementary school.