VIRAMONTES, Helena María

Born 26 February 1954, Los Angeles, California

Daughter of Serafin and María LaBrada Viramontes; married Eloy Rodríguez, 1983; children: Pilar, Eloy

Helena María Viramontes is a short story writer, editor, and screenwriter, as well as faculty member at Cornell University. She was born in East Los Angeles and graduated from Garfield High School. Growing up in a working-class family with eight brothers and sisters, she learned about hard work at an early age. If working 20 hours a week while carrying a full load at Immaculate Heart College (B.A., 1975) were not enough, she had the added pressure of being one of only five Chicanas in her class. Her first collection of short fiction, The Moths and Other Stories was published 10 years after college, in 1985. Some of the stories, especially "Growing," have now been republished in several anthologies. This early fiction presents Chicana subjects who are a contradictory blend of strengths and weaknesses, struggling against lives of unfulfilled potential and restrictions forced upon them because they are women. While racial prejudice and the economic and social oppression of Chicanos form the backdrop, Viramontes focuses her narrative lens on the cultural values that shape women's lives and against which they struggle with varying degrees of success.

Most of her stories develop a conflict between a Chicana and the man who represents the maximum authority in her life, either father or husband, i.e., society mores dictated by the patriarch. To assume more independence and responsibility in their lives, these women must break with years of indoctrination by the church. In "Birthday," Alice's abortion radically redefines her relationship to her religion. In "The Long Reconciliation," Amanda's decision to abort because she cannot bear to "watch a child slowly rot" in poverty defies the values of her husband as well as the dictates of the priest: "It is so hard being female, Amanda, and you must understand that this is the way it was meant to be." The main character in "The Broken Web" reveals her disillusionment with "a distant God." "Her children in time would forgive her. But God? He would never understand. He was a man, too."

In most cases, Viramontes' characters pay dearly for breaking with traditional values, and the exploration of their sexuality outside the bounds of cultural norms often brings negative consequences. The two women who abort are either wracked with guilt or ostracized by their communities. By murdering her husband, the nameless woman of "The Broken Web" breaks a cycle of use and abuse but suffers both literal incarceration and the belief that she has condemned her soul to eternal punishment.

"Growing" and "The Moths" explores the relationship between the culture and female sexuality in that crucial phase in the life of a Chicana when she ceases to be a girl and must accept her role as "woman." In "Growing," Naomi rebels against the mandate that her life must change because her body has changed. When she asks for an explanation, her father responds in Spanish, "Tú eres mujer" (you are a woman, or a female), and her mother says nothing. She understands that she will always have other duties than her brother because she is a woman, and that she must be chaperoned, or watched carefully, also because she is a woman.

"The Moths" also depicts the coercive socialization of adolescent girls in femininity. The adolescent tomboy of the story is acutely aware that she is "different" from her "pretty" and "nice" older sisters. Estranged from her mother and sisters, she is close to her grandmother, whose body she bathes after her death in a cleansing ritual that is also a rite of passage. The words she whispers, "I heard you, abuelita…I heard you," suggest that she may have inherited from her grandmother the strength to alter her culture's definitions of "man" and "woman."

Two of Viramontes' strongest stories, for demonstrating in writing the ethnic and gender barriers to obtaining voice in the U.S. society, are "The Cariboo Cafe" from her book The Moths and "The Jumping Bean" published in 1995 in Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film. In "Cariboo Cafe," a technique of unheard, parallel monologues provides for striking expression: a third-world feminist's meditation on the function of silence and the overtly sociopolitical commentary on the plight of those individuals displaced by either economic necessity or political horrors. The illiterate, the silent, the unintelligible, the senselessly violent, and those driven mad by life in extreme poverty all appear in quick strokes before the reader's eyes, as they come to the "zero zero cafe," a virtual no-man's-land. The police and strangers are to be feared at all times; these individuals' only safety lies in silence.

"The Jumping Bean," written several years later, represents an important moment in Viramontes' writing for the integration of the competing discourses of ethnicity, gender, and the aesthetic. A father brings home a bag of jumping beans, the result of an ethnic ridicule he suffers at his job, and gives them to his daughters to play with. While a cruel joke was played on him, he turns the beans to a positive act by giving them to his children for playthings. His eldest daughter, however, wants to free the caterpillar in each bean, and diligently works at cracking the beans open, thus metaphorically freeing her ethnicity. When she is scolded, however, and told to account for one last bean, her younger sister swallows the bean rather than have it turned over, directly confronting her own fear and her father. The daughters, who express their pain when they are silenced by covering their mouths with their hands, have symbolically placed themselves in the dark interior of a jumping bean. The jumping beans represent speech and empowerment as well as the potential to overcome ethnic slurs and patriarchal silence. The father's behavior, however, is seen to be caused in part by harsh working conditions and the cruelty of coworkers.

Viramontes has said that her writing of this story helped her develop male characters more fully in her later work. In The Moths, her stories in effect screamed and shouted against the pain her female characters experienced, even as they were silenced. In later stories and especially in her novel Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), male characters are more "complicated." The principal male character in this novel, Perfecto, makes many sacrifices for his family, but is about to leave when he senses his common-law wife is pregnant again. Even so, he is seen as a human being who has been worn down by the conditions under which migrants must work. And he is a help to Estrella (the mother's oldest child) as she finds her own voice in this migrant family that keeps its civil papers (proving citizenship in this country) tucked into the feet of the plaster statue of Jesus disassembled and reassembled and mounted on an altar each time the family moves. Eventually, the statue is broken, and Estrella symbolically replaces the image as she stands tall atop the barn she has been forbidden to enter.

While accomplishing a superb work of fiction in Under the Feet of Jesus, Viramontes also continues to study and write critically. In 1987 she collaborated on a first book with fellow Los Angeleno, María Herrera-Sobek, editing Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature, one of the first books of criticism on Hispanic writing by women. A provocative combination of original poetry, prose, criticism, and visual art, the book documented the continuing growth of literature by and about Chicanas. Through innovative use of language and images, the editors collected 1970s and 1980s discourse on economic and social injustice, gender roles, and female sexuality critical theory. Seven years later, Viramontes collaborated again with Herrera-Sobek on Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film.

Viramontes has been awarded two consecutive first prize awards in fiction by the California State University at Los Angeles' Statement magazine, and a third prize award in fiction from the University of California at Irvine. In 1989 she received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Viramontes was selected from a national pool of nominees by Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez to participate in a ten-day storytelling workshop sponsored by the Sundance Institute in Utah. She completed an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of California at Irvine in 1997, and is working on a novel titled Their Dogs Came with Them and her second collection of short stories, called Paris Rats in East Los Angeles. She lives in Ithaca, New York, and teaches at Cornell University.

Bibliography:

Corpi, L., ed., Máscaras (1997). McCracken, E., New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity (1999). Rebolledo, T. D., Women Singing in the Snow (1995). Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (1992).

Reference works:

CA (1979). CANR (1989). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995).

Other references:

Américas Review (Fall-Winter 1987; Summer 1989). Chasqui-Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana (Nov.1995). Journal of American Studies (Aug. 1989). New Boston Review (Mar. 1984). NYT (27 Nov. 1983). TLS (2 Mar. 1984, 24 May 1985, 8 July 1988). Wilson Quarterly (Winter 1984). Women's Studies (1989).

—YVONNE YARBRO-BEJARANO

ELIZABETH COONROD MARTINEZ