CHICANAS AND LATIN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS EXPLORING THE REALM OF THE KITCHEN AS A SELF-EMPOWERING SITE Edited by Maria Claudia André ‘Women’s Studies Volume 32 The Edwin Mellen Press Lewiston*QueenstonsLampeterLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chicanas and Latin American women writers exploring the realm of the kitchen as a self-empowering site / edited by Maria Claudia André. p.cm. -- (Women’s studies ; v. 32) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7734-7344-0 1. Spanish American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Spanish American literature~20th century—History and criticism, 3. Feminism and literature-Latin America~History and criticism. 4. Women and literature-Latin America. 5. Women in literature. 6. Cookery in literature. 7. Kitchens in literature. 8. Hispanic American literature (Spanish)—Women authors--History and criticism. 1 André, Maria Claudia. II. Women’s studies (Lewiston, N.Y.) ; v. 32. PQ7081 .C43 2001 860.9'9282'0980904—de21 2001031591 This is volume 32 in the continuing series | Women’s Studies |Volume 32 ISBN 0-7734-7344-0 IWS Series ISBN_0-88946-118-X A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2001 The Edwin Mellen Press Alll rights reserved. For information contact The Edwin Mellen Press The Edwin Mellen Press Box 450 Box 67 Lewiston, New York Queenston, Ontario USA 14092-0450 CANADA LOS ILO The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd. Lampeter, Ceredigion, Wales UNITED KINGDOM SA48 8LT Printed in the United States of America For Our Friends, Grandmothers, Mothers and DaughtersLibrary of Congress Cataloging-ia-Publication Data ‘Chicanas and Latin American women writers exploring the realm of the kitchen as a selfempowcring site / edited by Maria Claudia André. p.em. = (Women's studies ; v. 32) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7734-7344-0 1, Spanish American literature-Women authors--History and criticism. 2. Spanish American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Feminism and literature—Latin Ametica—History and criticism. 4. Women and titerature—Latin ‘America. 5, Women in literatuse, 6, Cookery in literature. 7. Kitchens in literature, 8, Hispanic American literature (Spanish)—Wamen authors—History and etiticism. 1. André, Maria Claudia, 11, Women’s studies (Lewiston, NY) jv. 32. PQ7081 C43 2001 860.9°9282'0980904—de2 1 2001031591 Volume 32 ISBN 0-7734-7344-0 WS Series ISBN 0-B8946-118-X. ACIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2001 “The Edwin Metien Press All rights reserved. For information contact The Edwin Metten Press The Edvvin Mellen Pross Box 450 Box 67 Lewiston, New York Queenston, Ontario USA. 14092-0450 CANADA ‘LOS ILO The Edwin Mellen Press, Led. Lampeter, Ceredigion, Wales UNITED KINGDOM SA4B < Printed in the United States of America For Our Friends, Grandmothers. Mothers and DaughtersCONTENTS Preface fi Foreword. The Muse, tlie Meat, the Mallet: Cooking/ Writing Novels Angélica Gorodischer ! v Acknowledgements! x Introduction Culinary Fiettons 11 The Raw and the Cooked: Cooking and the Transgression of Boundaries in Like Water for Chocolate, Kathleen Basstone (47 Culinary Concvetions of the Female Self in the Stories of Rasario Castellanos and Angeles Mastretta, Lee-Anne Laffey (75 Cooking with Words: The Kitchen as a Subversive Space. Viviona Rangit [97 Innovative Recipes for the Ulimate Jouissance in the Works of Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel and Tununa Mercado. Maria Claudia André! (19 Index! 155Cooking with Words: The Kitchen as a Subversive Space Viviana Rangil In the prologue to Cocina eclécrica, Juana Manuel Gorriti, a 19" century Argentinean writer, before distancing herself from the kitchen and “confessing” to the transgressive nature of her acts of reading, explains that El hogar es el santuario doméstico. Su ara es el fogon, su sacerdotiza (sic) y guardian natural la mujer. Ella, solo ella, sabe inventar esas cosas exquisitas que hacen de la mesa un encanto, y que dictaron a Brantome el consejo dado a la princesa, que le preguntaba como haria para sugetar(sic) a su esposo al lado suyo: --Asidlo por la boca.' This passage represents a clear example of how the kitchen space can function. On the one hand, it is an area reserved for women, and precisely because of that itis limited and limiting. Private, role allocated spaces, as in the case of the kitchen, promote isolation, lack of intellectual stimulation, and the belief that nurturing is a woman’s innate characteristic. On the other hand, it can also function as a perceived area of power, since only women ~particularly in traditional Latino culture—-fully occupy that particular space and control what happens inside of it. Feminism has taken objection with this notion of power, arguing that in fact the kitchen and most other assigned domestic places keep women disempowered. By constituting certain places as the private and exclusive domain of women an additional effect is gained: an idealization of the space that “obscures the historical problem of the limitation of women’s exchange to certain levels orly” (Castillo, xiv), that of the domestic spaceThe concepts and notions of place and space have been widely used in feminist theory, in cultural studies, and in other disciplines with varying meanings and connotations. The present study focuses on the kitchen as both space and place, and in this context place is the site where events occur. Space refers to the ideological, symbolic, and idealized conceptualization and the role of a particular location The kitchen then as a place is a real, material, concrete, and daily environment that women traverse, but it is also a space for recreating and subverting that with which the kitchen is associated in women’s lives, and ite for the articulation of new meanings and values therefore it becomes the The Latina poets considered in this analysis use the kitchen space to open up the possibility of subverting its role as an assigned place. Through language, these poets create a space and offer a representation of it that has the potential for reshaping the reader’s perception of what it means to be and to cook as a Latina woman. Since space in this corpus is by definition linguistic, Amy Kaminsky’s propositions are to the point Space, as we know it, is, perhaps, a function of language; but space and the physical, material world it grounds and represents are also constructive of language. There is a physical world, of which we make sense hy a kind of graphing and that remains even in our absence—to be graphed, differently perhaps, by others. (44) Precisely because in poetry the word can be so opaque, and because the ambiguity of the linguistic sign opens a gap between itself and the referent, a figurative space arises where Latinas can develop a different approach to that which has traditionally been constructed as private space Latinas have reclaimed the space of the kitchen, not only as a private place and creating, savoring and consuming take place, but also as a nd cl ing where cook space-place for empowerment, tradition, the focus of this study evidences the poets’ attempts to recuperate what hi and omemaker (ama considered a sub-culture of women as wife mother /nurtu and political space from where to de casa).” By using the kitchen as a privat99 write and contest the dominant patriarchal ideology, these Latina writers destabilize not only dominant models about the role of home space, but also and most importantly they question the notion of space as a-historical and devoid of political relevance. Using Adriana Cavarero’s concept of a “feminine symbolic order,” | argue that the Latina writers under consideration trace a feminine symbolic order in which the kitchen is 2 space, not just a place.’ Sandra Maria Esteves and Luz Maria Umpierre address the question of the proper place that Latinas should occupy and of the representation of that space. In parallel poems they speak to each other, they address Latina’s preoccupations with tradition and change. In “My Name is Maria Christina,” Esteves rejects discrimination and racism, and accepts her tradition and heritage. In “In Response,” Umpierre reacts to and a rejects Esteves’s proposition, My name is Maria Christina Tam a Puerto Rican woman born in el bartio Our men...they call me xegra because they love me and in turn I teach them to be strong I respect their ways inherited from our proud ancestors I do not tease them with eye catching clothes Ido not sleep with their brothers and cousins although I have been told that this is a liberal society I do not poison their bellies with instant chemical food our table holds food from earth and sun I do. not complain about cooking for my family because abuela taught me that woman is the master of fire I do not complain about nursing children because I determine the direction of their values (Esteves, 63)"Loo When it comes to nourishment, the poetic voice forcefully articulates her belief in the old ways and tradition, as expressed in the distinction between “food from earth and sun” and “chemical food”, and makes a negative statement about packaged (and probably fast) foods representing a different way of life. She openly criticizes to the “American” way of life in which there is no real cooking and therefore no sense of nurturing, family, and tradition’, The reference to “poison” obviously points to the contaminating’ negative effects of food that does not come from natural sources (earth and sun). But poison also refers to a way of thinking and believing it refers to a “liberal society” where everything seems to be acceptable, and where the conceptualization of the role of women does not do justice to the real power of women. The power and the fire the kitchen provides and represents, the power of cooking, and the real and symbolic acts of nurturing exceed the mere act of providing food, since for the poetic voice they represent the power of shaping a future generation, Fast food represents the loss of power as a result of not being able to cook, of not being in charge of nurturing. Her perspective is one of empowerment even though this means confinement to the kitchen. By utilizing the assigned space, performing the expected tasks, and fulfilling the prescribed role, the poetic voice is not just abiding by the patriarchal rule, but also, in the subversive act of teaching her children “to read and develop their minds/so they will understand the reality of oppression,” she dislocates the patriarchal order of things In my judgement, Esteves’s conception of the kitchen is defined in her own capacity and according to her principles, therefore it becomes the basis of judgement, then the time that she spends in the kitchen carves out a feminine space where Latina women belong to themselves.° To Esteves’s traditional view of women’s role in society, Umpierre responds with a counter-argument that proclaims a new consciousness stemming from of the realization of the 2 ideology of patriarchy and the gender roles it recreates constrain101 My name is not Maria Cristina Lam a Puerto Rican woman born in another barrio Our men...they call me pushie for | speak without a forked tongue and ! do fix the leaks in all faucets. [don’t accept their ways, shed down from macho-men ancestors sleep around whenever it is possible, no permission needed from dearest marido or kissing loving papa [need not poison anyone's belly but my owns no cooking mama here; I cook but in a different form. 1 do complain, [will complain Ido revise, I don’t conceal, [ will reveal, I will revise. (Umpierre, 1) In these two poems the reader should consider not only the spaces represented (the kitchen and the house), but also the social spaces from which the representation 1S made and the positionalities such spaces imply. For Esteves the domestic space both teaches and transmits tradition and culture, but it is also the place where awareness about the “reality of oppression” develops. In “My Name is Maria Christina,” there seems to be no social space outside of the house where women can act and adopt a subject position. Yet the poetic voice 1s clearly inscribed within a social space that marks her as oppressed and as a caregiver, denoting a positionality that she wishes would change for her children, when they “become strong and full of life,” but that she does not wish to change for herself. In Fsteves’s poem there is an acceptance of the “way things are” for (Latina)of food and nutrition women and of the idea of women as the providers not only but also of discipline, education, and love “In Response” is a strong reaction to the learned gender roles that abound in the Latino community. Here the poetic voice is intent on revealing, complaining, and revising. It is the political voice of a strong, educated woman for whom “the only way to fight oppression is through resistance.” The poet's repetition of being able to fix leaks in the plumbing emphasizes the difference in the competence of this woman in comparison with the other woman in the Kitchen. She does not have to rely on a man, which would place her in a dependent position. She cooks for herself and repairs mechanical things in the Kitchen by herself. In both cases, repairing and cooking gain strength and importance in the poem because they are ambivalent, ambiguous words, that can refer to household tasks as well as to sexual activities, To complicate matters further, the poetic voice keeps insisting that she “speaks without a forked (or twisted) tongue,” giving us the idea that her words are the plain truth. Umpierre’s poem reveals a positionality where the social and the personal spaces collapse in a simultaneity. The social is much more deeply imbricated in the personal in the Poet's redefinition of the private space. At the same time the private, represented by her “house within,” is part of the social since she uses her knowledge and experience to “teach my students to question authority / to have no fears, no nail biting in class.” Teaching is traversing the public space. The space of the kitchen is one of the frames in which the poems and the Poets are enclosed. Another frame is that of “el barrio,” which represents an assigned social space where Latinas are usually contained and objectified (as those who stay in the kitchen and only cook). But the poems subvert the fixed nature of the framing and create spaces that support life and nourishment by placing women at the center of the space created by both frames and defining a positionality in which kitchen/street, cookingécreating can be self-directed productive, fulfilling activities and not assigned roles103 The two poems demonstrate a shift in perspective. “My name is Maria Christina” depicts a Puerto Rican woman who now lives in another place (el barrio, the United States), but who is still positioned within the same space that has been assigned to her in the patriarchal order—the kitchen. In “In Response” the poetic voice has discovered different positionalities and has created a space for herself inside and outside of an ideological framework that she contests and rejects. In both poems there is a sense of contamination of spaces. In Esteves’ poem, the figure of the self-sacrificing mother is contaminated (threatened) by the figure of the “pushie” and “bitchie,” or by the influence of the American way of, life. In Umpierre’s poem, the contamination the liberal society has created, reflects the possibility of a Latina that is nurturing in ways not related to the kitchen. “In Response” offers the vision of a woman outside of the house and the Kitchen who can nurture and create through active engagement in intellectual “revising.” Even after much debate on private and public spaces and places, after substantial gains in terms of the positions and places open to women, the societal sense of spaces and places as well as women’s mobility remains gendered. For women in general and for Latinas in particular the reclaiming of the private space as that which is not assigned but is used to create and produce new forms of | practice. As Guerra-Cunningham knowing and believing, has become a cruci suggests, the dichotomy between the domestic (mundane-transient) and public (tanscendent) is erased by women’s cultural and social strategies that modify the meaning and representation of traditional roles attributed to them and the domestic tasks they perform (174). A te-conceptualization of the domestic space is presented in Lucha Corpi’s “Protocolo de verduras.” In this poem the speaker addresses both the issue of the presentation and representation of the kitchen space, the realm of the home and the implications of what is supposed to happen in themto The world demands impeccable diplomacy, Protocol exists, or so they say, even among vegetable and in my house there's no time any more even for melancholy, that is loneliness laid bare, because | must tend to the affairs of ironing day, and write poems when I can between the shifting winds of the tempest in the laundry So don’t reproach me if read you between the lines of Civilization and Its Discontenss (Translated by Catherine Rodriguez Nieto. Rebolledo and Rivero, 281) Corpi acknowledges the constraints and demands of housework and complains about domestic tasks that constitute an obstacle to her writing. At the same lime she expresses her views (on domesticity) with beautiful and intriguing language that summons winds and tempest, melancholy and loneliness, perhaps Signaling’ marking/ making explicit the poet's own passionate emotions, The Space of the house belongs to her, she is “e! angel del hogar," since it is upon her and her domain that tasks are imposed. Even with the apparent impossibility of escaping {rom a fixed position, the poetic voice manages to transgress pre- ations in the acts of writing and reading. Corpi’s poem presents established desi snses: the kitchen is the place where the reader with that which is evident to the food and feeding as nurturing come about, in the same way that the creating w105 house is supposed to be the environment where women’s duties are performed But “Protocolo de verduras” also expresses what the kitchen represents for the poetic voice: oppression, drudgery, loneliness, routine. Pethaps the most important reference is at the end of the poem. Corpi uses the reference to Freud’s work (published in 1929) to focus our attention on the conflict between an individual's quest for freedom and society's demand for conformity. In this case the dichotomy is between the patriarchal representation of home and kitchen as the proper and safe spaces for women, and Corpi’s presentation of the reality attached to that representation. Splitting the tittle in two lines marks the ironic tone that Corpi wishes to convey to the well-known Freudian text, in which female subjectivity is completely ignored. She subverts the meaning of Freud’s text by using its title to denote a female perspective about the position of women within “civilization.”? But even more important than the reference to Freud and its interpretation, is Corpi’s own enactment of “reading between the lines.” Corpi uses the charged notions of the space between the lines to push her readers to do their own reading between the lines. The space that exists between the lines of her own poem and of a known text direct our attention to the blank space that exists inside of a poem and that which it seeks to represent. So what is there between civilization and discontent? A tentative response would be: women creating their own space. The poems analyzed above show that the gendering of space and place “both reflects and has effects back on the ways in which gender is constructed and understood in the societies in which we live” (Massey, 186). The kitchen can be coded as nurturing and creative, traditional, private and safe, and therefore it is gendered female. But Latinas are reconceptualizing the gendering of the space. The representation and the presentation of the elements the private space encompasses, evidence the foundation of new modes of utilizing space, or in Cavarero’s words, the constitution of a feminine symbolic order. As Guerra- Cunningham also states106, Lejos de ser la manufactora que, de modo automatico y _pasivo, se dedica a realizar labores del hogar, en estos discursos, se destaca como sujeto creativo e¢ imaginativo, inserto en actividades domésticas que poseen la potencialidad de construirse en fermento endrador de una praxis cultural. (Guerra, 174)'° Place can be articulated in essentialist terms if it is interpreted as that which is already defined (a result) rather than as the endeavor of becoming (a process). That is to say if we consider place as immutable, unchangeable, and static, it serves the purpose of establishing a category that can be fixed and does not allow for the possibility of change. Thus the kitchen can become a fixed space where women’s roles and tradition remain unchallenged and unchanged, where they exercise their “subjugated knowledges.""' But, like in a recipe, the creation of a known dish and the creation of a particular space have much in common. The familiar ingredients and the already known spaces are there, yet each time the recipe is made, new variables are at play.'* Teresa Palomo Acosta deftly articulates the fluidity and lack of boundaries that cooking entails The creation of the divine, the corn tortilla, requires that she and her comadres have time to exchange tips, leisurely, over café, on street comers un poco de esto, un poquito de aquello. (Milligan et.al. 1) This approach to the kitchen space is not absolute, since it involves a relational process in which even street corners play a role in the “creation” of the tortilla, The public/outside space that intervenes in the process of cooking/thinking/creating. signals the impossibility of claiming an “absolute” location. The kitchen is no longer the only space where women can generate ideas and resistance. Street comers, supermercados, circles of people eating anywhere are now being integrated into the cooking’ eating’ creating experience. The kitchen ceases to be the only authentic space where recipes, traditions, nurturing and womanhood reside, Authenticity is no longer predicated upon a fixed space107 As stated above, time plays a preponderant role in this conceptualization of space. W.I.T. Mitchell proposes a definition of space as an order of coexistent data that is “useful because its spatial conceptions are both relational and kinematic, allowing for multiple orders of data in complex relationships, and it refuses to abstract itself from the temporal modality” (275).'> Space and time are therefore interrelated, and they both contribute to and constitute a spatiality that has movement and the possibility of change. We can see this movement in Cordelia Candelaria’s “Haciendo tamales” Entonces, como su mama antes y su abuelita she made her tamales from memory cada sabor nuevo como el calor dei Westinghouse where she cooked them with gas under G.E. lights~ bien original to the max (Rebolledo and Rivero 115) Time is here both change and tradition. But as Teresa Palomo Acosta suggests, memory, belief, and traditional practices do not have to take the form of nostalgia. On the contrary, in the case of this poem, it is obvious that the space of the kitchen is not just a physical space that can be measured and defined geometrically, but a place where lived practices and symbolic meaning and significance coexist and (re)create cultural practices. A particular private space, the kitchen does not have to signify remembrance as that which belongs to an unchangeable past. Memory offers women the possibility of telling untold stories, of changing a past that anchors them into a non-subject (object) position." Memory serves to revise and review the past and also to constitute a present based the on an apprehension of tradition with critical eyes. As Revill states, importance of historically situated social practices (and 1 will add here, that cooking is such a practice for Latinas) to the maintenance of community ath as a store of knowledye and as justification of the organization is continuance or repetition of practices” (128),108 There is in some Latina poetry a celebration of a multiplicity of home- places articulated through the idea of not having a fixed, authentic recipe, but rather, as Teresa Palomo Acosta sardonically suggests This set of non-instnuctions is brought to you from the oral tradition cookbook (authors—las mujeres; circa—you name it) (Milligan et.al.1) Palomo Acosta uses colloquial language almost as if she were reading from a manual, or a cookbook, but without giving an exact recipe. She calls for “just enough masa, {just enough heat, / just enough time.” The ‘ransgressive/subversive nature of the language is given by the use of “enough,” since it is the indefinite element that refuses anchoring or authenticity, yet it seems to be the essential. The use of “circa” and “you name it” in the same line indicates the poetic voice's Oppositional relationship to authoritative textuality and authorized categories of knowledge. The key, the secret to the recipe is the experience of time spent in the kitchen. The set of non-instructions, or recipes made from memory, are in fact recipes for the constitution of new spaces where women can remember and invent at the same time, where they can reshape and Create space-time interrelations that defy’ fixed categories and assigned spaces. Places are not shielded from change, they are not sanctuaries with unchangeable, real meaning. “Chorizo con Huevo Made in the Microwave” by Barbara Brinson Curiel makes it clear that cooking and the kitchen are not the same. Traditions, articulated in the form of a Particular recipe, change with the Passing of time and the need to straddle two cultures Microwave 2 minutes. Serve. Eat your chorizo con huevo with pale tortillas Remember grandma eating, craving chorizo cooked109 over an outdoor stove in a Tucson summer. (Hemande: jutierrez 273) The transformation of “chorizo con huevo” from an old to a new recipe and the constitution of a new kitchen where instead of an outdoor stove there is an indoor microwave signal movement and tension at the same time. The contrast between the memories of the food and the use of the microwave exposes the moment of transition between nostalgia and the future, and we can even visualize the fusion of past and present in the moment of microwaving the “chorizo.” The kitchen and cooking become fragmented places/spaces that can no longer contain only one kind of recipe or only one conceptualization/idealization of womanhood. Therefore the concept of place becomes a process that signals a permanent tension between the production of that space and the struggle to control its representation."* This process then determines how the social existence of Latinas 's “spatially inscribed.” (Soja, 56) It is obvious that for Latinas it is no longer possible to associate certain places with remembering and nostalgia only. A more accessible and viable conceptualization of places and spaces should reinforce the fact that space is a social construct. Space is constituted in the interactions of social relations and through material social practices.'® The kitchen space is therefore a function and a result of a complex set of familiar and social practices associated with cooking and eating. But the familiarity and the normalcy attached to what we consider everyday events can be used in a subversive way if the terms of what is consumed in Ti Yo No Soy Nada/ Without You I Am Nothing.” are inverted, A reading of“ by Beverly Silva allows at least two contrasting interpretations You are Phe salsa in my enchilada The meat in my burrito The olive in my tamal The chocolate in my mole Certainly | can live without you, my love But without you lite is likeHO A taco without a tortilla Guacamole without avocado Salt without lemon Accake without sugar (Rebolledo and Rivero, 359) Man is here the main ingredient, so he can be conceived of as that which defines, but the woman is in charge of cooking and consuming, she is the one who decides. Her use of food as a marker of identity for a man points to the symbolic complexity of food in society, and inverts the role of a place/space. The poet also subverts the typical image of woman's sex as edible, and instead uses man as the one who can be consumed.'” “The kitchen is no longer seen as the invisible unproductive, domestic sphere. It becomes aesthetically and ethically productive” (Oyaratin, 88). The social space of the kitchen continues to be intimate and creative, but it is also a lab. The poem stresses the need to continue to create together if there is to be survival. But it also idealizes the complementary nature of the sexes, and in that sense it re-inscribes gender roles. The Latinas poets selected for this study make explicit the idea that space (in this case the kitchen space) is a social construct that is created out of social relations and everyday practices. One can no longer conceive space as a static, a- historical locus, but rather as a concept that evolves out of “complex and disruptive interpretive processes” (Brady, 117) where the kitchen can function in a disruptive capacity, destabilizing the pre-conceived notions of the proper place. In “Making Tortillas” Alicia Gaspar de Alba disrupts the kitchen and the making of food as patriarchal notions associated only with women in charge of traditional families through the lens of a “tortiliera”® My body remembers what it means to love slowly, what it means to start from scratch to soak the maiz scatter bonedust in the limewater,and let the seeds soften overnight Presses between the palms, clap-clap Thin yellow moons— p-clap still moist, heavy still from last night’s soaking (Rebolledo and Rivero, 355) The kitchen is here a subversive space where women can love women and compare their lovemaking to the making of tortillas, nurturing the body with the senses and nurturing it with food. The phrase “clap clap,” repeated several times in this poem, defines a physical movement that points to the sensual aspect of preparing food but imbricates it with the Lesbian sexual relationship as the hands alternate in clapping. At the same time, they shape the tortilla/kitchen as space; they redefine the shape of relationships. The poem calls into question the spatial category of the kitchen and assigns desire and pleasure to the typical “nourishing” characteristics associated with preparing food. Thus cooking in this poem has several functions: it is a process of appropriation of an established socially- gendered practice, it is a spatial acting out of the role of the place, and it implies relations among differentiated positions. If social power is in direct relationship to the production and control of space, then narratives that sustain and naturalize places as opaque, natural, and fixed (beyond contestation or negotiation) generate power for some and powerlessness for others.”? But because space is a social construction, there is also the possibility of the production of a space (through poetry/writing) that has a Jifferent set of parameters in which social existence is inscribed by women, in such a way that it shows resistance to patriarchal models and thus creates the sossibility for a revaluation of a place like the kitchen and the positioning of women within that space.An analysis of cooking’food/kitchen from the theoretical point of view of the location and constitution of a (subject) positionality yields three notions about space that are crucial for Latinas: First: Space, particularly the kitchen space, is not immutable but rather changeable. and because of that it cannot be considered the site of the real and essentializing characteristics of that which is private and therefore belongs to women only, and to tradition and nostalgia Second: Even though society’s notion of space and the particularities of the representations assigned to certain places (like the kitchen) are gendered, Latinas use spaces’places in order to subvert traditional representations and thus create new approaches to the process of constituting a space (in the real material world as well as in the symbolic world of the poem), Third: The exploration of social relations within the private space, and shifting sites for the articulation of power, points to the fact that places and spaces are social constructions and as such are subject to change not just by the material social conditions under which we exist, but also by the power of the poetic voice As a Latina who cooks, lives and teaches in the United States, I struggle with the ambivalences of conceptualizing and "feeling" that the kitchen is a place and a space. The title of this article reflects part of that ambivalence, since I do “cook” with words a conceptualization of the kitchen that puts me at peace with my theoretical and self-reflexive side in terms of the role and position of women in society. And I also have a passion for cooking food, for preparing and savoring sumptuous meals and sinful desserts that put me at peace with my creativity and with my own sense of a social positioning that need not exclude either aspect of my life. The kitchen is a space for expressing the creative aspects of my Personality, but it is not the only defining element in the constitution of my identity. I would disagree with Probyn when she says that “the kitchen is now sold to women as a new sphere of sensual liberation (4), since | think the kitchen always been a place for sensual experiences. I would argue that we cannot ha:13 romanticize the role of women in the kitchen, nor can we be ignorant of the preponderant role that allocation and definition of space play In the constitution of modes of thinking, being, and believing NOTES "as quoted by Josefina Iriarte and Claudia Torre in “Juana Manuela Gorriti Cocina ecléctica, ‘Un si es no es de ajo molido””in Lea Fletcher ed Mujeres y cultura en la Argentina del siglo XIX. (Buenos Aires, Feminaria Editora, 1994): 80-86. [The home is the domestic sanctuary. Its altar is the stove, its priestess and natural guardian is the woman. She, and only she, knows how to invent those exquisite things that make ‘of the table an enchanted place, and that dictated Brantome the advise given to the princess who asked how would she keep her husband by her side: --Grab him by the mouth. (My translation from p. 80). > Some of the Chicana/Latina scholars who have addressed the issue of kitchen include Tey Diana Rebolledo, Eliana S. Rivero, Lueia Guerra-Cunningham 3 Cavarero, an Italian feminist philosopher, uses the Lacanian concept of the symbolic order and develops a re-reading of Penelope's positionality defined in terms of a circular temporality. “Penelope keeps herself in the present and, with her work, defines a separate place where she belongs to herself.” (12) “. Penelope weaves a time of cadenced repetition where, day after day, metis is actualized in the work of her hands. Metis exerts control over the situation and ams the weaver her own place of signification” (19). “In Yerba Buena this poem is entitled “A la mujer borinquefia,” but it had appeared before with the title “My name is Marfa Christina. ” See Barradas ceoemicncia femenina, conciencia social: Ia voz poética ce Sandra Maria Estévez.” 5 \merican” here to refers to the United States culture, not because it is the best choice, but because it represents a commonly used adjective that describes what the poet is implicitly addressing © For a detailed analysis of “time carved out for herself” see Cavarero, p. 17 {n Bluestone Mockingbird Mambo, Esteves wrote yet another response to “In Response”, a poem entitled "So Your Name Isn’t Maria C ristina,” in which she14 acknowledges the model provided by Umpierre but reflects on the issue of the Puerto Rican female identity taking into account tradition and change * For an analysis of the ideological justification for this “angel of the house” sce Bridget Aladaraca “El angel del hogar: The Cult of Domesticity in Nineeteenth Century Spain” in Theory and Practice of Feminist Literary Criticism, Gabriela Mora and Karen S. Van Hooft, eds. (Michigan: Bilingual Review Press, 1982), ° It is worth noting the title of some of the sections of Sigmund Freud’s (1856- 1939) Crvilization and lis Discontents (Garden City, NY. Doubleday & Co., 1958). The text is divided in the following chapters or parts: Part I: Man’s Need for Religion Arises from Feelings of Helplessness; Part II: Man Copes with Unhappiness Through Diversion, Substitution, and Intoxication; Part Ill: Man’s Conflict with Civilization: Liberty Vs. Equality. '° “Par from being the manufacturer that automatically and passively performs domestic tasks, in these discourses, the subject who is creative and Imaginative, is immersed in domestic activities that posses the potentiality of engendering cultural praxis” (my translation) ' “Subjugated knowledges refers not only to historical contents that are obscured within functionalist histories but also to those forms of experience that fall below the level of scientificity. The latter include the low-ranking knowledge of the Psychiatric patient, the hysteric, the housewife, the mother, to name only a few {...] Through the retrieval of subjugated knowledge, one establishes a historical knowledge of resistance and struggle” (Sawicki, 57). '° Even if you think you are using the same ingredients, they are not always the same. Flour doesn’t get wet with the same amount of liquid, sugar is sweeter, yeast takes longer to raise, caramel is not dulce de leche (from personal and family experience) '" Mitchell uses the concepts of space and time to address the issue of spatial form in Iterature and indicates that: “If we examine our experience of such unquestionably literal spatial forms as paintings, statues, buildings, and landscape gardens, we readily acknowledge that it takes time 10 experience and “decode” them, that we never apprehend space apart from time and movement [..] We cannot experience spatial form except in time, we cannot talk about our temporal 6) experience without invoking spatial measure well-known example of memories used to tel! untold stories and of the : in which those stories are told is Laura Esquivel’s novel Como kitchen as the siagua para chocolate. See the article by Kathleen Batstone in this volume on pp. 43-68 'S Addressing the everyday practice of walking in the city and analyzing the concept of public spaces, de Certeau argues that “Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body” (108). I propose that the kitchen space in Chorizo con Huevo Made in the Microwave functions also as a fragmentary and inward-turning history. '© For a detailed analysis of space as a social construction from a geographic/economic point of view, see “Uneven Development: Social Change and Spatial Division of Labour,” in Doreen Massey Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). "7 Note also that in “In Response” by Umpierre, there is a veiled and evident reference to the poet as a woman who "cooks men," obviously sexually speaking and of course the inference is that she also devours them © In Spanish, the word “tortillera” has two meanings; it refers to the woman who makes tortillas, and also it also refers to a lesbian woman. ‘S| am using some of the categories that de Certeau uses to define what he calls the “enunciative” function of space (97) 20 ‘The fact that space is a social construct also indicates that “the social is spatially constructed ” (Massey in Keith and Pile, 146), that is to say, we need to acknowledge that the social constructedness of the process affects both space and society. Transferring the social constructedness of spatiality to the written page, and following Kaminsky, we should acknowledge that “...spatial metaphors go further than confirming reality; they constitute it, Those dealing in the distinction between public and private, for example, relating them to men’s and women’s spheres respectively, have codified distinctions based on class privilege (only some women can afford to remain out of public commerce) and have held sway even after it became clear that they did not hold in reality. Even visual representations shore up hegemonic notions of spatial relations (41).116, WORKS CITED Barradas, Efrain. “Conciencia femenina, conciencia social: 1a voz poetica de Sandra Maria Esteves.” Third Woman.2 (1982): 31-34. Brady, Mary-Pat. “Contrapuntual Geographies in 1Vomen Hollering Creek and Other Stories.” American Literature 7| (March 1999): 117-150. Castillo, Debra A. 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Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. --- “Politics and Space/Time.” Keith, Michael and Steve Pile, eds, Place and the Politics of Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 1993 Mitchell, W.L.T, ed. The Language of Images. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980, Milligan, Bryce, Guerrero-Milligan, Mary, and Hoyos, Angela de, eds. Floricanto Siz A Collection of Latina Poetry. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Oyarzin, Kemy. “Beyond Hysteria: ‘Haute Cuisine’and ‘Cooking Lessons’ Writing as Production.” Lucia Guerra Cunningham, ed. Splintering Darkness: Latin American Women Writers in Search of Themselves. Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1990 Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites: FoodSex/dentities. London and New York: Routled: 00.8 Rebolledo, Tey Diana and Eliana S. Rivero, eds. Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature. Tucson and London: University of Arizona Press, 1993. Revill, George. “Reading Rosehill: Community, Identity and Inner-City Derby.” Michael Keith and Steve Pile eds. Place and the Politics of Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. 87-110 Sawicki, Jana. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body. New York and London: Routledge, 1991 Soja, Edward. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and Imagined Places Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1996. Umpierre-Herrera, Luz Maria. Y otras desgracias/And Other Misfortunes. Bloomington; Third Woman Press, 1990.