"I Carve Myself into my Hands": The Body Experienced from

Within in Ana Mendieta's Work and Migdalia Cruz's Miriam's

Flowers

Clara Escoda Agustí

Hispanic Review, Volume 75, Number 3, Summer 2007, pp. 289-311 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hir.2007.0017

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/222094

[ Access provided at 25 Oct 2020 19:33 GMT from Newcastle University ]

‘‘I C arve Myself into my Hands’’
The Body Experienced from Within in Ana Mendieta’s Work and
Migdalia Cruz’s Miriam’s Flowers

Clara Escoda Agustı́

Universitat de Barcelona

Set in 1975 in the Bronx, Miriam’s Flowers records the process of bereave-
ment of a Puerto Rican family after their son gets trapped on train tracks
when chasing after a baseball. In the play it is made clear from the beginning
that the accident has been caused by the authorities’ neglect towards poor
neighborhoods and immigrant communities, who react to the ‘‘accident’’ by
offering the family an economic compensation but do not invest in improv-
ing the neighborhood’s conditions. In a revealing sentence, Miriam, the fam-
ily’s daughter and protagonist, describes the violence of poverty and how it
has marked Puli’s body, yet she mixes the description with a degree of fasci-
nation for the fact that the family, otherwise voiceless and invisible, has ap-
peared in the papers: ‘‘How he was. All in pieces. I didn’t wanna look at it,
but . . . he’s the first one of us ever been in the paper’’ (Cruz 55). Indeed,
neither the government authorities nor Miriam’s family address the violence
of poverty and marginalization to which immigrant communities are subject
and which accounts for the son’s untimely death. As Miriam tells her lover
Enrique in one of the first scenes, refusing to forget ‘‘Crows eat other crows,
but are we supposed to go off eating all our dead relatives?’’ (65). Tiffany
Ana López has pointed out that, in Cruz’s plays, ‘‘violence [is] not eradicated
but merely redirected. The conditions that led to the [accident] are never
addressed by the adults in the community’’ (‘‘Violent’’ 59). Indeed, Miriam’s
mother, for instance, does not acknowledge that her son has died: ‘‘I ain’t

Hispanic Review (summer 2007) j 289

Copyright 䉷 2007 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.
290 i h is pa ni c r ev ie w : summer 2007

going to no funeral,’’ she says, ‘‘Nobody dead’’ (54), yet she acquires the
habit of spending more and more hours in a bathtub that is strangely remi-
niscent of Puli’s coffin, which was ‘‘small and white, like a little bathtub’’
(55). Delfina shuts herself off from life and denies her daughter’s living pres-
ence, adding to the invisibility Miriam feels with respect to the society that
marginalizes her.
The aim of this essay is to show how, in order for Miriam to become
visible both within her family and for the larger, American society, and in
her attempt to find a new language that may express and represent grief,
the protagonist begins a process of ‘‘critical re-signification’’ of the Hispanic
woman’s role and identity (López, ‘‘Violent Inscriptions’’ 186), through a
series of performances which remit to the practices of body art. Like a per-
formance artist—using her own body as a matrix on which to inscribe and
through which to enact this critical re-signification—Miriam masochistically
engages in different performances, having sex with strangers in order to ex-
press her grief over her brother’s death. Indeed, she will turn her sexual
experience into an artistic performance through which she can fragment her
body and empathically bond with her brother. The references to body art do
not restrict themselves to the experience of fragmentation offered by her
sexual performances, but many of them also include direct interventions on
her own body as, for instance, when she clips off body parts or carves pic-
tures into her arms that make her feel ‘‘like spring inside’’ (85). She later cuts
into her mother’s arm, with the aim of replacing negative social encodings
‘‘imprinted’’ on her mother’s body so that ‘‘they’ll treat [her] like a saint’’
(83). It is a search that Miriam undergoes privately—but this search becomes
public—that is, actually becomes a performance, as the character recounts
her experiences to other characters in the play. Most importantly, the per-
formative and public nature of theater allows Miriam’s inner search to be-
come an actual piece of performance art for the audience. It is in this sense
that Miriam’s particular mode of expression is linked to the performances of
other artists such as Ana Mendieta, a Cuban–American artist who, during
the 1970s and 1980s, also externalized through her body the oppression to
which Hispanic immigrant women are subject in the United States. Indeed,
this essay will analyze the theatrical performances Cruz expresses through
Miriam in the light of Ana Mendieta’s body art.
Even though Cruz and Mendieta both are Hispanic Caribbean immigrant
women, the origin and the context of their productions are different. Men-
dieta was born in Cuba and left the island during Operation Peter Pan, as
 Agustí : ‘ ‘i ca rv e m ys el f i nt o m y h an ds ’’ j 291

14,000 Cuban children were encouraged to flee Castro’s government and go

to the United States between 1960 and 1962, helped by Catholic organizations
funded by the US State Department. It was one of the world’s largest political
exoduses of children in history, accepted by families who feared for their
children’s future under Castro. This authorization, however, was not granted
to the parents, who would remain in Cuba to swell the ranks of the opposi-
tion to Fidel Castro. The CIA experts were confident that splitting up families
would undermine the parents’ support of the government, thus destabilizing
it, and unleashed a propaganda campaign to make Cubans believe that, under
a communist government, children as well as industries would become the
‘‘property of the state.’’ As such, Ana Mendieta’s sense of voicelessness and
her need to create alternative understandings of the female, racialized body
are also related to her sense of enforced exile and her fear of acculturation.
Migdalia Cruz, on the other hand, was born in the Bronx, and she is of
Puerto Rican descent. Puerto Rican immigrants in the Bronx are the least
integrated, poorest Hispanic group in the US, and they constitute, as it were,
an unheard, Third World voice within the nation. Thus, as one of a people
of color who are often not middle class, Cruz speaks for and about a group
whose journey is fraught with ‘‘complexities, struggles, and displacements’’
(Sandoval-Sánchez and Sternbach 69). The performances Cruz dramatizes in
her play, therefore, are also spurred by the need for visibility, stemming from
the desire to overcome the marginalization and violence of poverty.
Body art enables both Miriam and Mendieta to gain full psychological
autonomy and to situate themselves outside the oppression they receive as
‘‘others’’ from their most immediate Latino communities as well as the larger
American society. Indeed, both artists are interested in exposing that which
Charles Merewether has explained are Mendieta’s objectives: ‘‘the limits and
excesses of the body [that take them to] loci of extremity, the nearest possible
to the concept of death [ . . . ] which is the limit through which the horizon
of exteriority can be contemplated’’ (83). Body art signifies a return to corpo-
ral experience, attending both to the body’s own materiality and to its per-
ceptive dimension, and it resists the perpetuation and idealization of the
body as object, particularly that of the female. Hans-Thies Lehmann provides
a definition of performance art in relation to gendered identity in his book
Le Théâtre Postdramatique:1

1. Translations of Lehmann, Merewether, and Marchán-Fiz are my own.

292 i h is pa ni c r ev ie w : summer 2007

Those performances which have focused on the personal body are more
often than not a ‘‘female affair.’’ Amongst the most well-known are Rachel
Rosenthal, Carole Schneemann, Joan Jonas, Laurie Anderson, and Orlan.
[They question] the female body as surface of socially coded projections of
ideals, desires [ . . . ] and humiliations. This kind of feminist critique
intends to demonstrate that the image of the female that has been coded
by men, just as sexual identity, is a construction, and they aim at making
the audience aware of the projections of the male gaze. (225)

In their book Stages of Life: Transcultural Performance and Identity in US

Latina Theater, Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez and Nancy Saporta Sternbach, two
of the most important theorists working on Latina theater, have claimed that
the protagonists and characters in Latina plays and solo performances also
tend to inhabit ‘‘the space of a disidentified subject in a transcultural identity,
which is why they can claim their own agency in all its hybridity’’ (6). In this
sense, theater and performance are ‘‘the ideal cultural locations to examine [
. . . ] the transcultural subjectivity of Latinas on stage’’ (33). This is so because
of the ephemeral character of performance:

Performance always manifests itself as ‘‘a doing’’ by its actuality in the here
and now. However, at the moment that a performance is executed it be-
comes a past action, ‘‘a thing done,’’ which registers its ephemerality in
space and time. In that space and time, the body—as a cultural artefact—
functions as a site of that performance-in-the-making [ . . . ] a reminder
of what took place, as well as an indicator of future performances [ . . . ]
the body is the evidence, it also becomes the text of the performance. In
other words, speaking the text necessarily signifies speaking (with/through)
the body. (96).

Thus, as Sandoval-Sánchez claims in his article ‘‘Politicizing Abjection: In

the Manner of a Prologue for the Articulation of Latino Queer Identities,’’
performing and ‘‘writing’’ through or on the body becomes for these artists
‘‘the umbilical cord to abjection, to [their] migrancy [ . . . ] to [their] Latini-
dad, and to [their] survival [ . . . in order to] recover [their] corporeality
from a system of knowledge that is always aiming to transcend and sublimate
the materiality of the body and its biological processes’’ (543–7). Indeed, both
artists attempt to negotiate their ‘‘situatedness’’ as inhabiting cultural and
gendered bodies. Performance, in its work-in-progress character, helps them
 Agustí : ‘ ‘i ca rv e m ys el f i nt o m y h an ds ’’ j 293

‘‘create a positionality for the construction of new interstitial, border, hybrid

identities’’ (Sandoval-Sánchez and Sternbach 96).
However, and most importantly, by putting the audience in the position
of witnessing and experiencing their pain they also aim at reconfiguring the
audience’s understanding of subjectivity. These artists do not limit them-
selves to deconstructing the male gaze and those cultural significations that
have been enforced on the body, but instead, most importantly, they aim at
creating a new form of expression, as well as at reconfiguring the way in
which we have culturally been taught to perceive and understand subjectiv-
ity. Carole Boyce Davies argues that ‘‘racialized’’ women writers and artists
tend to display ‘‘migratory subjectivities’’, which ‘‘should be conceived not
primarily in terms of domination, subordination or ‘subalternization’ but in
terms of slipperiness, elsewheriness [ . . . ] As elsewhere denotes movement,
the female subjectivity [of Hispanic, immigrant women] asserts agency, the
ability to act in real-world communities, as it crosses borders, journeys, mi-
grates and so reclaims as it reasserts’’ (qtd. in Robinson 29). As Cruz herself
has stated, body art experimentation has, first and foremost, a creative goal
in mind, as it responds to ‘‘the need to make your own stigmata. Instead of
waiting for it to come upon you, you cut yourself and try to create something
new’’ (214). Both Cruz and Mendieta re-signify their bodies by unfixing their
subjectivities and identity and by understanding them in a process of becom-
ing, as a subject-in-process, assuming its ephemeral character, and perma-
nently becoming something other, something else.

‘‘The Body Is All You’ll Have’’

In her performances Death of a Chicken and Feathers on a Woman, Men-
dieta explores the rigidity of the gender roles that her Hispanic community
affords men and women. She is keen on dissociating the woman’s body from
male desire, which constructs it as ‘‘other’’ and encodes it with a series of
meanings that are male-centered, that is, that belong to the male’s sexual
experience and to the way the male has traditionally constructed his identity.
This construct limits women’s agency and voice and, ultimately, their dig-
nity.
In Death of a Chicken, Mendieta stands naked as a very white, virginal
chicken is ritually sacrificed. Then, she holds up its legs as the chicken stains
its own white feathers and Mendieta’s body with sprinkles of blood, until its
convulsions are over. Indeed, the chicken, with its red-stained feathers, be-
comes the white linen which traditionallly had been exhibited in order to
294 i h is pa ni c r ev ie w : summer 2007

prove to the community that the bride had been a virgin and was as ‘‘pure’’
and ‘‘clean’’ as the white cloth. The beheading of the chicken can be read as
a metaphor for female sexual initiation and, therefore, as a displaced suicide.
The artist’s nakedness signals the female’s vulnerability at moments of initia-
tion.

Detail from Death of a Chicken, 1972.

Mendieta exposes the violence and degradation of such a definition of

femininity, which implies that the female becomes a woman for her commu-
nity only through sexual possession, where she is made to adopt the role of
‘‘beheaded’’ victim. Mendieta’s aim is, indeed, to keep the destiny of her
body in her own hands and to experience a different approximation to sexu-
ality from the one she has received as natural from her community. The
chicken is a metaphor for the white handkerchief which, in practically all
Western cultures, the woman has been made to exhibit, thus fulfilling the
ideal of virginity. Yet, as the chicken sprinkles Mendieta’s body with blood,
this ritual of virginity is challenged and transgressed through an evocation of
menstruation, as well. By adding menstruation as initiation to the experience
of one’s own body, Mendieta reinterprets sexuality as a self-affirmation of
the body.
Another layer of meaning is related to Mendieta’s hybrid position as a
Cuban American, which makes her partake of the cultural legacy of santerı́a.
Santerı́a is a group of religious systems from Afro-Cuban communities that,
during slavery, slaves had used as a way to maintain cohesion, while also
creating a space of liberation from the roles imposed by slave-holders. In
these rituals, doves, goats, and pigs would be sacrificed, with the aim of in-
voking the spirits (Eggun) so that they might restore a loss or heal an illness.
 Agustí : ‘ ‘i ca rv e m ys el f i nt o m y h an ds ’’ j 295

In this sense, Mendieta’s sacrifice of the chicken becomes an initiation ritual

through which she invokes abject forces but hybridizes them with herself in
order to bring about a new experience of identity and sexuality, one that is
removed from traditional cultural representations.

Feathers on a Woman, 1972.

When, in the second part of the performance, called Feathers on a Woman,

she covers herself up with feathers, Mendieta mirrors her culture’s policing
of the female body, taking it to its logical conclusion. In this case, she imper-
sonates—and is thus transformed into—a docile white chicken, displaying
the subconscious of patriarchal and sexist societies. What Mendieta aims to
demonstrate is that the female body has, historically, been the arena in which
larger political struggles have been fought, even as it is often policed to facili-
tate men’s dominance. Admittedly, the point is to highlight the transforma-
tion that cultural rituals, practices, and discourses effect on subjects.
Through the external imposition of mediated, enforced identities, subjects
are actually ‘‘transformed’’ into the identities extolled by the powers-that-be.
Mendieta’s denouncement of her culture’s traditional practices finds an
echo in contemporary discourses that—albeit more subtly and less openly
patriarchal—also aim to produce a series of female myths like that of the
super star, or the self-centered model, or the aggressive, executive female, to
name a few. In mainstream white society, the female body also remains a
target upon which to impose a series of identities that benefit the interests of
corporations and of the market. Women are expected to self-regulate
through them, thus impersonating and becoming those more docile identi-
ties.
Yet, in the process of impersonating the chicken, Mendieta also explores
296 i h is pa ni c r ev ie w : summer 2007

the possibilities of abjection. She becomes an abject entity, an interstitial

space between the person and the animal, between male and female, between
flesh and feathers. Sandoval-Sánchez defines abjection as ‘‘something that
allows for the examination of the very special dynamics between self and
other [because it refuses] the assumed unity, stability and closure of the iden-
tity of the hegemonic subject’’ (‘‘Politicizing’’ 547). He continues: ‘‘it is the
dark side of narcissism [ . . . ] the underside of a stable subject identity, an
abyss at the borders of the subject’s existence’’ (547). That is, abjection is
what one hides deep within, keeps in check, represses, and ultimately trans-
poses on the feared Other. Mendieta’s body, however, becomes the site where
differences, understood as clashes, collisions, fusions, and confrontations be-
tween two or more cultures, meet and are validated in the process of negoti-
ating her own identity out of the given social relations and discursive
formations of power. In seeking to position herself politically in what Sando-
val-Sánchez and Sternbach call the ‘‘dialectical ‘give and take’ of a subjectiv-
ity-in-process’’ there is ‘‘no room for unified, monolithic, homogeneous
identities’’ (96). Audience and performer both simultaneously attest to the
imaginative possibilities of merging with otherness and validating alterity. A
subjectivity in process is articulated in all its performativity.
Miriam achieves something very similar in Miriam’s Flowers as she engages
in sex with unknown men. Miriam uses penetration, which within her com-
munity marks a female as ‘‘woman,’’ in order to fragment and divide her
female identity, to de-stabilize it, thereby allowing for a multiplicity of mean-
ings to emerge, out of which she attempts to re-codify her definition of fe-
maleness. However, as happens with Mendieta when she impersonates the
chicken, Miriam’s sexual conduct is also ambivalent. While she tries to claim
some alternative identity, she is objectifying and torturing her body, sup-
pressing it, and using the same mechanisms as those of the patriarchal gaze
that objectifies her:

I let [the men] fuck me and it feel good to be fucked that way, fucked to
death. I wanted men pounding into me. Splitting me open . . . Inside my
house. Every time one of them slipped his dick inside me, I felt that train
running over Puli’s face—crushing him, beating him down into the dirt,
between the rails. I imagined my body was Puli’s being smashed into the
tracks, smearing the tracks wif his blood. I smeared those mens. [ . . . ]
They pumped so hard I felt their dicks coming outta my mouf. I waned to
 Agustí : ‘ ‘i ca rv e m ys el f i nt o m y h an ds ’’ j 297

choke on their dicks. I waned to be split in half. That’s the only way I saw
to make it happen. (64)

Yet sex helps her multiply her identity, express feelings of rage, grief, and
empathy with her brother, also dissolving frontiers between the male and
female bodies and roles, as both her brother’s body, which has been undone
by external conditions and her own are fragmented. Gender is a cultural
category that is produced as it is enacted, that is, it is constituted through a
series of performances. Aware that identity is also generated and enacted,
Miriam tries to use performance in order to ‘‘disintegrate’’ her culturally
constituted body, suggesting by her multiplication and fragmentation of it,
that even morphology itself is a cultural inscription and is ‘‘read into’’ bodies.
And, what at first seems a contradiction in terms (objectification as a means
toward liberation) is ultimately part of the same strategy. Her aim is to take
female sexual reification to its limits, trying to escape it through parodic
practice, which deconstructs and makes evident the absurdities and failings
of hegemonic conceptual schemes. At the same time, in multiplying her body
and making it plural, Miriam enacts the ‘‘unrepresentable within a perva-
sively masculinist, phallogocentric language’’ (Butler 9). As Judith Butler ex-
plains in Gender Trouble, ‘‘the univocity of sex, the internal coherence of
gender, and the binary framework for both sex and gender are regulatory
fictions that are consolidated and naturalize the convergent power regimes
of masculine and heterosexist oppression’’ (9–10, 33). Miriam’s paradox is
that, while she intends to challenge patriarchy by disintegrating her ‘‘femi-
nine’’ body, while she re-conceives it as a site of subversive multiplicity, she
is doing so by using and reifying her body through sex, which is the same
way in which patriarchy has constrained and marked the feminine, gendering
the body as female. What is important, however, is that she is the agent, not
the bearer, of the reifying look.
In the same vein, Deleuze and Guattari are also concerned with rethinking
the body and deconstructing the traditional binary oppositions that have
been associated with it. One example is the opposition between pleasure and
pain, which only promotes the delineation of taboos and the understanding
of the body primarily in terms of production. In A Thousand Plateaus they
propose a non-hierarchical, non-stratified body, which they call the body
without organs and which they define as ‘‘an uninterrupted continuum [ . . . ]
the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire
(with desire defined as a process of production, without reference to any
exterior agency’’ (154). Miriam’s masochism allows only for intensities to
298 i h is pa ni c r ev ie w : summer 2007

circulate and flow, and in so doing, she sets free her desire and undoes social
hierarchies and binary oppositions: ‘‘The body without organs is what re-
mains when you take away [ . . . ] precisely the phantasy, and significances
and subjectifications as a whole’’ (Deleuze and Guattari 151). Through the
character of Miriam, Migdalia Cruz uses a masochistic performance in order
to restore her body and that of her community to life, detaching them from
external significations (which, in the context of the play, are represented by
Puli’s remains).
Miriam therefore also uses the male body in order to effect essential
changes on hers, in order, that is, to go through a liminal experience that
allows her to situate herself beyond culturally pre-scripted meanings and
unfix her subjectivity. By privileging abjection, she ‘‘recognizes the provi-
sionality of [any] identity’’ (Sandoval-Sánchez 549) and explores and creates
other forms of being than those that are dictated to her. Hers is, indeed, a
challenging body, a ‘‘body in revolt, corporaliz[ing] difference and heteroge-
neity (Sandoval-Sánchez 549). Like Mendieta, Cruz continually tries to open
a space between the body and the cultural text that has been written on the
body of the Hispanic, immigrant woman, be it through self-fragmentation
or through hybridization with feathers.
Religion, like gender, has also helped justify the subordination of Hispanic
women to males through, as Sandra Cisneros expresses it, the production of
a ‘‘silence regarding Latinas and our bodies’’ (48). She continues: ‘‘Church
ignored them and pointed us women toward our destiny—marriage and
motherhood’’ (48). Religious iconography and rituals have a very strong
presence in Cruz’s play. As the stage directions indicate, there are three altars
in the play’s various settings: ‘‘the home altar . . . with an image of San
Martı́n de Porres, the church altar, with a white plaster ‘Pieta’ and the funeral
home altar, with simple red candles’’ (53).
Hispanic women in the United States find themselves in a space of negoti-
ation between reverence to the past and a distancing of specific aspects from
that past which are deemed oppressive. For example, just as Miriam, as an
adolescent, experiences change as possible and necessary, her privileged posi-
tion as part of a community that stands between two geographical borders
allows her to renegotiate the acquired meanings and mould them into more
valid strategies of survival that speak to the new context. In his essay, ‘‘Nego-
tiating Borders in Three Latino Plays,’’ referring to migratory experiences
such as Cruz’s and Ana Mendieta’s, Jorge Huerta expresses that
 Agustí : ‘ ‘i ca rv e m ys el f i nt o m y h an ds ’’ j 299

‘‘these diverse peoples’’ who have migrated for various reasons to the
United States find themselves caught between the old and the new tradi-
tions of one culture colliding with those of another even if new traditions
are defined. In that collision, drama is born; in that collision, borders are
defined and constructed, or destroyed and abandoned. (154)

One of the borders that has to be negotiated pertains to women’s roles

and body, that is, women’s relationship with motherhood, as it traditionally
has been dictated by the Catholic Church. Indeed, at several moments in the
play, Miriam addresses the female saints directly, talking to them about the
flowers she carves in her arms and hands with a razor blade while carving
out figures in their arms:

Miriam holds a library book as she kneels before the altar of San Martı́n. She
speaks to the Saint (Cruz 1992: 62):
I got an idea from this book I got from the library. It tells about how when
saints bleed, they smell like violets . . . Is that true? Does your blood smell
like flowers, San Martı́n? (She takes out a razor and carves gently into the
statue’s arm. Then she smells the spot . . . she then cuts into her own arm and
sniffs).
Nope. Just plain ole blood . . . (62)

Provocatively, Miriam addresses a male saint, San Martı́n, with a library

book and cuts him, inverting the traditional power hierarchy where it is men
who have authority ‘‘to cut’’ and make inscriptions on women’s bodies. As
such, she challenges traditionally uncontested sources of authority. ‘‘Nope.
Just plain ole blood,’’ she tells the saint, demystifying the sacredness of patri-
archal knowledge (embodied in books) and religious authority (embodied in
male saints and priests). She undoes the borders of male privilege and takes
herself as an immanent reference—‘‘she cuts into her own arm and sniffs.’’
Again, it is her body, not external forces of subjection, which provides her
with the knowledge of experience.
Miriam later finds herself at the church, talking to the ‘‘Pieta’’ plaster and
telling her how she experiences and crosses borders with her body:

I am the invisible girl, Mary . . . always searching for a hole in the wall to
pull myself through to get to the other side. The other side is only for me,
I could see myself then. I could feel my fingertips then and the pointy
300 i h is pa ni c r ev ie w : summer 2007

pieces of skin being torn down the sides of my fingers. I could see the scars
then, on the bottom of my thumbs from the Wilkinson Swords—I write
on myself with them. I carve myself into my hands. (70)

She tells the Virgin Mary that ‘‘she carves herself into her hands’’, revealing
her desire to transcend the roles which are available to her as a woman,
particularly those dictated by the church. In ‘‘Latinas and Religion: Subordi-
nation or State of Grace?’’ Laura Padilla comments that, with respect to the
Catholic Church, ‘‘Latinas/os have remained on the margins of Catholic
leadership, with Latinas nearly invisible’’ (988). What is striking about the
scene in this play is that the Virgin Mary, who signifies spiritual repentance
and female submission, is told about pleasurable, ecstatic acts of female self-
creation. Indeed, Miriam tells the Virgin that she feels invisible in her com-
munity and in the larger, American society, yet she has carved out this ‘‘other
side’’ for herself from where she disrupts borders and taboos and can explore
alternative significations. The play, then, engages in a deconstructive dia-
logue with painters such as Alma López, Yolanda López, and Isabel Martinez,
who have begun to provocatively re-envisage female religious iconography,
particularly the Virgin Mary, redefining it according to their female perspec-
tive and desire for gender equality. They too liberate it from its oppressive
meanings and keep its significations of resistance.
Similarly, in a series of performances called Writing with Blood, Mendieta
appears as though she were possessed, evoking a form of intoxication similar
to Miriam’s, which occurs when she speaks to the Virgin about her language
of masochism. Both moments of ‘‘intoxication’’ constitute the origin and the
object of a creative process. Mendieta also makes use of masochism in order
to blur the frontiers between pain and pleasure and, thus, dissolve her sub-
jectivity into otherness, unfixing it.
Merewether argues that masochism ‘‘is a form of accumulating power
through the loss of the self, a way of untying subjectivity and dissolving its
limits into otherness’’ (116). It is through this series of creative strategies that
both women ‘‘carve themselves into their hands’’ anew, in a series of writings
that express their subjectivity-in-process. Merewether quotes Kristeva, who
defines the masochistic economy of Christian mysticism ‘‘as a fountain of
infinite joy which, far from benefiting symbolic and institutional power, dis-
places it indefinitely, within a discourse in which the subject is reabsorbed in
the communication with the Other and with others’’ (106). Indeed, both
Cruz and Mendieta break the taboos between life and death, pleasure and
 Agustí : ‘ ‘i ca rv e m ys el f i nt o m y h an ds ’’ j 301

Body Tracks, University of Iowa, Iowa, 1974.

pain, through ecstasy. In doing so, they approximate the liminal experience
of death to seek a point of externalization from institutionalized discourses
of power in order to de-territorialize their desire and express it in a non-
institutionalized language. And indeed, this search often leads them to an
order of pre-symbolic forms. Simón Marchán-Fiz argues that ‘‘the self-repre-
sentations of gestures, the corporal or kinetic dynamism of the face, etc. are
born of anti-cultural gestures [ . . . ] residues of communicative forms from
early childhood, archaic, ambiguous, and untranslatable’’ (240). And indeed,
both Cruz and Mendreta present this other order, which they access through
the body, as a reservoir of creativity for the individual.

Continuity of Desire
But Miriam’s performances also exist in tension with a society that directs
and subjects women’s bodies, fixing in place a standard of beauty set by the
dominant culture from which the Hispanic woman is partly excluded by her
being ‘‘racialized’’ from the point of view of white society. The beauty myth
reorients women, encouraging them to give up their political voice in favor
of more self-centered values, in a strategic move that pertains to a disciplin-
ary society, aiming at making individuals, and particularly women, docile
precisely at a moment when they begin to have access to power positions
traditionally occupied by men.
The ideological aims of the beauty myth are all the more obvious and
strong for Hispanic women, whose body and physical difference has a unique
political potential, in that they can challenge this model, paradoxically, by
virtue of their being excluded from it. Indeed, their own perspective as out-
302 i h is pa ni c r ev ie w : summer 2007

siders allows them a vantage point from which to observe society’s contradic-
tions. In the words of Marı́a P. Figueroa: ‘‘straight hair is normative,
preferred and beautiful, while ‘rizos’ are ordinary, undesirable, common and
just too natural’’ (402). She argues that this ideology ‘‘reveals a will to reject
particular ‘ethnic’ markers by values grounded in commercial marketing’’
(403). The play shows how Miriam has internalized this objectification of
women by media discourses even as she is able to effect an ironic distancing
from it. She is aware of the construct behind society’s definitions of beauty,
of the political aims of her own exclusion. She challenges Enrique, the store
owner, by taking this objectification to its limits: ‘‘I look like milk. I taste like
it too. You can put me in your refrigerator and I can dance around and get
people to buy stuff’’ (71). In the larger American society, women are defined
as beautiful products to be put on display. Michel Foucault comments that
‘‘[this kind of] discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’
bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of
utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). It
reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and
turns it into a relation of strict subjection’’ (138). As opposed to this dis-
cliplined body, Miriam presents us instead with an anarchic body:

I cut my pussy sometimes wif a nail clipper. I just clip off little parts and
then I pump and pump until I come so there is blood on my pillow—so I
know somefin’ fuckin’ happened. He only got hurt once, but I hurt all the
time for him. I take his hurt from him so he don’ feel it no more. My pussy
is his little brain being smooshed between metal. That red was blood and
rust. The purple’s his brain. (64)

Miriam fetishizes her own body through performances of body art, dis-
membering it and reifying it. By fetishizing her vagina, turning it into a mul-
tiplicity of objects, Miriam also works out the state of things exhorted by
patriarchal society that engraves its meanings on women’s bodies. Instead,
she opens the female body to a multiplicity of meanings liberated by the
work of art, transforming her body into an active producer of meaning, not
its passive bearer. Tony Godfrey, in his Conceptual Art, where he analyzes the
works of many female body artists, interprets the women’s intention to turn
themselves into the art object, the ready-made, as ‘‘an attempt to reclaim
their own body, and other women’s bodies, from the power of men to turn
them into sex, or art, objects’’ (283). Indeed, what characterizes the ready-
 Agustí : ‘ ‘i ca rv e m ys el f i nt o m y h an ds ’’ j 303

made, what makes it meaningful, is the intentionality that singles out an

object as artistic. It is obvious that the intentionality that lies behind the
objectification of women’s bodies carried out by patriarchal culture is not
the same one that causes the woman to intervene on her corporal identity.
The former would be a gesture of domination, the latter one of self-affirma-
tion.
Migdalia Cruz uses Hispanic English in a very striking manner in order to
portray Miriam’s speech throughout the play. Nuyoricans, or Puerto Ricans
who live in the Barrio (the traditional heart of the New York Puerto Rican
community) can code-switch in up to five dialects of Spanish and English.
This is due to the variety of Puerto Rican members that make up the neigh-
borhood, comprising individuals with different levels of education and social
position, and ranging from those who come as visitors and then leave to
those who were born in New York. Cruz shows ‘‘the community has a bilin-
gual/multidialectal repertoire’’ (Zentella 40), their non-static, various and
fluid identities. As Zentella expresses it in her anthropolitical research Grow-
ing Up Bilingual, through code-switching among different varieties ‘‘[the
community] construct[s] a model of their culture which challenges the nar-
rower compartmentalizations of both Puerto Rico and the United States’’
(40). Indeed, the identities deployed in the many varieties of Puerto Rican
English are primarily not oppositional. Instead, ‘‘code switching responds to
their construction of an identity that does not ‘‘pit a mainstream, standard
English-speaking identity against their primary ethnolinguistic identity’’
(Zentella 16). Cruz reflects different varieties of Puerto Rican English through
Miriam, as she is transgressive in the literal sense of the word, that is, in the
sense that she keeps moving from one community to the other, asserting
belonging in between both communities, playing with fluid, non-opposi-
tional, and multiple identities.
Note, however, that the variety she uses to speak to the Virgin Mary is not
the same she uses to talk about her sexual performances. Compare the more
English-sounding sentence ‘‘I could feel my fingertips then and the pointy
pieces of skin being torn down the sides of my fingers’’ (70) with ‘‘I cut my
pussy sometimes wif a nail clipper’’ (64). According to Zentella, ‘‘the varieties
are spoken by an individual with specific interlocutors or for specific pur-
poses’’ (41) and ‘‘the switching accomplishes an essential communicative
work’’ (13). When Miriam talks to the Virgin Mary her English is more accu-
rate, she shows more self-control in the grammaticality of words, and she
makes no transfers. It is, in Zentella’s words, a ‘‘careful speech type’’ (120–21)
304 i h is pa ni c r ev ie w : summer 2007

in which the switches, occurring mainly in casual conversation, are notably

reduced. Miriam’s higher formality in that earlier scene attests to her percep-
tion of the Virgin Mary as a cultural authority and as an important figure for
the community’s identity. She is aware that she is speaking to a figure of
cultural importance and signification, and this makes her challenge to what
she represents all the more self-conscious.
Yet in the scenes in which she speaks of her relationship to sexuality, Miri-
am’s English is more marked by transfers from Spanish into English. Cruz
portrays Miriam as a young adolescent and, as such, she may not have ac-
quired some linguistic constraints yet. Furthermore, the younger the children
are ‘‘the more ‘violations’ of the neat differentiation between the languages
occur’’ (51). In these cases, the purity and specificity of English is trans-
gressed, as she mixes it with Spanish. Notice how Miriam switches the prepo-
sition ‘‘with’’ with ‘‘wif’’ or ‘‘something’’ with ‘‘somefin’’ or ‘‘mouth’’ with
‘‘mouf’’ (Cruz 64). Unlike Castilian Spanish, Puerto Rican Spanish does not
have the interdental voiceless fricatives appearing in the English word
‘‘thank.’’ Because of it, Miriam replaces English phonemes with Spanish
ones. Sometimes, the transfer amounts to applying a grammatical rule in
Spanish to English words, such as when Miriam claims that she ‘‘smeared
those mens’’ (64) by adding a final -s to the noun, as in Spanish, instead of
the English irregular plural. By using Hispanic English in the scenes in which
she talks about her sexuality, Cruz communicates Miriam’s search for a more
innate, Puerto Rican identity, as she tries to achieve a more direct relation-
ship with her body. Thus, transculturation does not necessarily imply further
adaptation to and negotiation with the hegemonic culture, but often the self
turns inward in order to draw strength from the more ‘‘primitive’’ or intu-
ited identity: ‘‘I wanted men pounding into me . . . I imagined my body was
Puli’s, being smashed into the tracks, smearing the tracks wif his blood. I
smeared those men’s’’ (64). Her Hispanic English tries to convey the pathos
of her search and experimentation with cultural and corporeal identity, and
the language she speaks, in this sense, mirrors what she is doing to her body.
In order to achieve a greater control over female representation, and to
criticize the fact that the female has almost exclusively been represented
through a male perspective, in Glass on a Body Mendieta produces a series of
distortions first on her face, and then on her own body with a glass, herself
becoming the art object. In these distortions she appears sometimes with
large lips, which mirror and at the same time exaggerate the demands placed
on women’s bodies by the beauty myths, by discourses of submission and,
 Agustí : ‘ ‘i ca rv e m ys el f i nt o m y h an ds ’’ j 305

ultimately, by all those discourses generated by the patriarchal and racist gaze
and the demands of a consumerist society.

Detail of Glass on Body, University of Iowa, Iowa, 1972.

Thus, femaleness is not embodied by every single woman, in her difference

from other women, but is an ideal, an unauthentic form which must be
achieved. Mendieta’s crumpled face against the mirror reflects both the vio-
lence caused by these demands and the silencing, the distortion of identity
they wield on the female. Upon her face are brought to bear different types
of oppression, both internal to her own community, having to do with patri-
archal control of religious experience, and external, relative to racism and
sexism. In this sense, Mendieta’s performances reflect, in the violence they
use, ‘‘the violent actions behind the construction of community in its strug-
gles over power and boundaries that so often result in the literal policing of
the female body’’ (López, ‘‘Violent’’ 59).
In the images where her body appears distorted a fragmentation can be
observed, which is produced by the objectification to which the female is
subjected by the male gaze, and which propagates mainly through the media,
specifically through mainstream cinematic discourses. The female body ap-
pears, thus, not as an agent, a producer of meaning, but as its bearer, the
screen on which somebody else’s identity—the male identity—is projected.
Curiously enough, in Cruz’s play, Miriam’s mother points out the homoge-
nization of individuals that television attempts to produce: ‘‘I said it was
stupid to buy a suit. Kids in suits look like midgets, especially boys. Or like
monkeys. They always put monkeys in suits for T.V. shows. I didn’t want my
boy to dress like a monkey’’ (61). In Mendieta’s Glass on Body, the glass
works like a metaphor for television and cinematic screens: the rectangular
306 i h is pa ni c r ev ie w : summer 2007

Detail of Glass on Body, University of Iowa, Iowa, 1972.

glass acts in the manner of a screen, delimiting a scene and making the audi-
ence aware that representation implies a distortion. Both Cruz and Mendieta
break the taboos of secrecy of the female body, which we are not used to
seeing naked unless it bears the imprint of male desire, as it is mostly male
power spheres that still hold control of its forms of representation. By break-
ing with male exhibitionism and the spectacle of the female body, these pho-
tographs represent it as the inescapable foundation of the human being.
Migdalia Cruz and Ana Mendieta are particularly interested, therefore, in
finding a locus of otherness from which to situate themselves outside society,
from which to escape the taboos that lock them into a binary in which they
come to occupy its inferior part as doubly ‘‘others’’ from white patriarchal
society—as ‘racialized’ and as gendered. Both artists, then, are severely criti-
cal of the taboos that the symbolic order creates in order to isolate the notion
of death and construct disciplinary meanings of productivity, effectiveness,
and privilege. And indeed, it is by taboo-breaking that Mendieta criticizes
the series of binaries and exclusions by which language and society function.
In Death of a Chicken, Mendieta achieves, in the words of Merewether, ‘‘a
profound criticism of the social sphere and an attempt of thinking that which
is exterior, the heterogeneous, as a place of reestablishment and dissolution
 Agustí : ‘ ‘i ca rv e m ys el f i nt o m y h an ds ’’ j 307

at the same time’’ (84). In this performance, she achieves this taboo-breaking
by producing ‘‘an initial stage of exchange between the agonizing body and
the living being. In staging the sacrifice of the animal, her performance per-
petrates a scene of rape, of violation, which is taboo’’ (Merewether 90), that
is, something which Western audiences might instinctively consider, defen-
sively, as belonging to a primitive society. This is the same response they may
give to Migdalia Cruz’s scenes of taboo self-mutilation.
Cruz and Mendieta’s works offer a cultural critique of the symbolic order
and of bourgeois society as generators and maskers of violence. In Mendieta’s
own words, community is strengthened and purified by these immersions
into chaos, since they dissolve the binary of life and death, which assures
meaning and guarantees the stability of the symbolic order: ‘‘Ritual death
promotes rebirth [ . . . ] the party signifies a return to a remote and undiffer-
entiated, prenatal and pre-social state [ . . . ] The group emerges strengthened
from this immersion into chaos. It plunges into its own origins, into the
uterus from which it once sprung’’ (96). Though body art, both Miriam
and Mendieta deterritorialize their own bodies, detaching them from social,
mediated, ideological processes of subjection, exploring hybrid junctures
(between pleasure and pain, life and death, happiness and suffering) which
in our society are mutually exclusive, their zones of ambiguity considered
taboo. Thus, as Sandoval-Sánchez and Sternbach have put it, ‘‘rather than
viewing such spatial creations as idiosyncratic acts of ‘irrationality,’ escapism,
and madness, we may interpret them as acts of intervention and survival
[ . . . ] For these experimentations permit them to fantasize and create uto-
pian ‘imagined communities’ ’’ (53) within the play’s context and through
the empathic links they pursue and develop with the audience.
As such, the media that these artists use are intimately related to the way
in which they seek to impact the reader/audience. Indeed, we might also have
access to Miriam’s and Mendieta’s performances in a mediated manner, that
is, we might experience the play through text or witness Mendieta’s perform-
ances through photography. Yet these are forms of registering which defer
the pathos of that which they are trying to convey; they distance it from the
audience, because it cannot be present at the specific moment (the hic et
nunc) of the performance, in which it takes place as a unique and unrepeat-
able act, as an event. There is something in that deferral which remains inef-
fable and is lost in the process. Yet through performance we can access this
pathos, because it is created at the same moment in which the performance
takes place. As Lehmann puts it,
308 i h is pa ni c r ev ie w : summer 2007

performance art tends to an experience of the real. It doesn’t propose a

representation but the approximation to an immediate experience of the
real (time, space, body). That which is momentary, simultaneous, that
which happens ‘‘only once’’ constitutes the experiences of time of an art
which doesn’t limit itself to presenting the finished result of an act of cre-
ation, but which values, in particular, the time process as it constitutes
images (216–17).

Performance art is deliberately anti-theatrical. It seeks to eliminate plot,

characterization, and setting in favor of a performance of and on the actual
self. In performance, the actor is no longer the representative of a role, but,
in its literal sense, the performer who offers his/her presence on the stage
for contemplation. Migdalia Cruz, therefore, through Miriam, describes this
situation rather than enacting it. By choosing theater as a medium, she does
not so much offer the performances directly as describe them, approximating
what a performance would be like through the mimetic possibilities of the-
ater, leaving it up to the audience to supply the ‘‘real,’’ or what theater can-
not account for. Thus, the necessity to stimulate empathy in the audience
and share this process of hybridism and creativity with it, are underlying
factors of her play. Furthermore, the play does not just stage solo and shared
performances; it also builds its structure in the manner of snapshots. Many
scenes present the interactions that the family members keep with each other
in a particularly performative manner, and the stage directions give indica-
tions that their communicative acts should be markedly theatrical. Each
scene contains an action, a performance, carried out by the family members.
The scenes, furthermore, do not follow a chronological, linear order, but
often account for dream structures—as for instance, a scene of past life with
Puli, or Miriam’s dreams and nightmares—which are intercalated between
scenes in the present time. Its plot is built through different, apparently dis-
connected, performative acts, approaching Mendieta’s and the anti-theatrical
objectives of performance art. Thus, both Cruz and Mendieta seek to offer
the notion of ‘‘presence rather than [ . . . ] representation, to enact an experi-
ence rather than to transmit an experience, to offer a process instead of a
result, and to manifest instead of signifying, to show an impulsion of energy
rather than to articulate it as information’’ (134).
In conclusion, they propose a spatial, non-hierarchical subjectivity, consti-
tuted by zones of intensity and continuity of desire in order to achieve full
psychological autonomy in a society that makes them dramatically subject to
 Agustí : ‘ ‘i ca rv e m ys el f i nt o m y h an ds ’’ j 309

Flowers on Body, El Yagul, Oaxaca, Mexico, 1973.

class, race, and gender markers. By housing abjection, then, these artists
undo homophobia, racism, and sexism and challenge imposed, external
identities. Talking about his personal experience with AIDS, Sandoval-Sán-
chez expresses in the form of a poem the sense of creativity, of participating
in alterity, that derives from housing abjection within one’s own body. His
account of how AIDS brought him into contact with corporeality, mortality,
and fragility, as well as difference and, ultimately, creation, has much in com-
mon with what Cruz and Mendieta seek to achieve in their performances
and through theater:

My sangre is not my blood anymore

I must give it away in body samples
Drop by drop
Only the vampires can touch it.
(. . .) My women friends laugh at me
(. . .) They say: ‘you must be pregnant’
It feels like it
Can a man give birth?
I know that something is moving inside me
(. . .) Oh, mi monstruo!
I incubate it
I feed it
I nurse it
I caress it
I cherish it (546).
310 i h is pa ni c r ev ie w : summer 2007

Their ultimate goal, indeed, is to validate difference, turning it not only

into a positive value but into the cornerstone of progress and survival. If the
taboo, as Foucault describes it, ‘‘traces the limit that will define difference in
relation to all other differences, the external frontier of the abnormal’’ (183),
then Cruz and Mendieta, by producing openings with the abject and with
otherness, attempt to signal the possibilities for the renewal of meaning latent
in the breaking of taboos, expanding the community’s understanding of itself
and making it address issues which it may attempt to veil and to reduce.
Thus, they foreground the need for creative change.

Works Cited

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the Virgen de Guadalupe. Ed. Ana Castillo. New York: Riverhead, 1996.
Cruz, Migdalia. Miriam’s Flowers. Shattering the Myth: Plays by Hispanic Women. Ed.
Lillian Feyder. Houston: Arte Público P, 1992.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge, 1990.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
Godfrey, Tony. Conceptual Art. London: Phaidon, 1998.
Figueroa, Marı́a P. ‘‘Resisting Beauty and Real Women Have Curves.’’ Velvet Barrios:
Popular Culture and Chicano/a Sexualities. Ed. Alicia Gaspar de Alba. New York: Pal-
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Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Huerta, Jorge. ‘‘Negotiating Borders in Three Latino Plays.’’ Of Borders and Thresholds.
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Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Le Théâtre Postdramatique. Trans. Philippe-Herni Ledru. Paris:
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López, Tiffany Ana. ‘‘Black Opium. An Interview with Migdalia Cruz.’’ Latinas on Stage:
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Press, 2000. 201–15.
——— ‘‘Violent Inscriptions: Writing the Body and Making Community in Four Plays
by Migdalia Cruz.’’ Theatre Journal 52 (2000): 51–66.
Merewether, Charles. ‘‘De la inscripción a la disolución: un ensayo sobre el consumo en
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http://www.law.ucdavis.edu/lawreview/Padilla.pdf. 8 Apr. 2005.
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Robinson, Douglas. Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained. Manchester:
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Sandoval-Sánchez, Alberto. ‘‘Politicizing Abjection: In the Manner of a Prologue for the
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Sandoval-Sánchez, Alberto and Nancy Saporta Sternbach. Stages of Life: Transcultural
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