Latino/a Literary Studies in Siberia

Recent global challenges, growing migration, and openness of borders have increased the number of multicultural and multilingual communities. Inspired by such communities, literary phenomena acknowledge and reveal diverse intersections of cultural traditions. US Latino/a literature reflects contemporary sociocultural realities, presents a developing field, and attracts more and more academic interest. It is no surprise that Trans-Baikal researchers’ interest in US Latino/a literature

studies is growing. Russia and the US are multiethnic and multilingual countries. Siberia is a part of Russia in North Asia, extending from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific. Southeastern Siberia is also called the Trans-Baikal Region, or the Zabaikalsky Krai. Scholars draw cultural and sociological parallelism between the Southeast of Siberia and the Southwest of the US (Voronchenko 2000; Baranova 2006; Stephanovich 2006). Geographically, the Siberian Southeast is the place where the Russian border with Mongolia and China lies. This territory of Russia has always been characterized by demographic diversification. It is a space of constant intercultural exchange and crossings, an area inhabited by many nationalities and ethnic groups. Economic, political, sociocultural, and linguistic aspects of Trans-Baikal borderlands are subjects of active discussions at annual conferences and forums. Cultural and literary parallels drawn between Russia and the US define new perspectives for comparative studies, building up a dialogue and revising former assumptions. According to a widely spread hypothesis, the first people came to America from

Asia (Vasilyev et al 2009). They arrived by walking across a broad “land bridge” where the Bering Strait now separates Siberia and Alaska. They were the people whom Christopher Columbus later called “Indians.” In 1787, Thomas Jefferson reflected on similarities between Indians and peoples of Eastern Asia and a possibility of their Asian heritage. An urge to learn about their ancestors makes US Latino/a authors explore their genealogy and study the history of cultures. This search for roots may draw them to faraway places and lead them to unexpected discoveries as it happens in Chicano in China (1984) written by Mexican-American writer Rudolfo Anaya (Voronchenko 2006). In this book he tries to establish points of intersection between Chicanos and Asians and finds commonalities in their mythological

thinking, like the sacrality of the number four as the foundation of the universe and the importance of the center as a model of the fifth continent of the world. Border writing in the US embraces analogies that remind us of common historical grounds for the cultures that seem rather distant from each other at first sight. US Latino/a studies in Siberia is centered around the Institute of Philology and

Crosscultural Communications at Zabaikalsky State University in Chita, Russia, headed by Tatyana Voronchenko. In 1995, she pioneered US Latino/a studies in Trans-Baikal and established a school to unite scholars, graduate and undergraduate students involved in research on literatures that are representative of different ethnic groups in the US and Siberia. Dissertations prepared by the representatives of this school have introduced many new names in American literature to the Russian academy. On the one hand, to be aware of modern literary trends and developments, graduate students analyze works by border theorists and US Latino/a critics. On the other hand, they have a chance to select works from a wide range of Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, Dominican-American, Cuban-American, and other US Latino/a authors. They are not limited in their choices, which vary from works by well-established authors such as Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Julia Alvarez, and Cristina García to emerging US Latino/a voices. Researchers from Trans-Baikal work closely with other scholars in Russia,

especially with Alexander Vaschenko, chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Moscow State University. His articles and the book America Argues with America: Ethnic Literatures in the USA, written in 1998, were among the first publications in Russia that focused attention on works by the authors of diverse ethnic identities in the US and informed approaches for further analysis. Vaschenko chairs the panel “Ethnic Literatures of the USA” at the annual conference of the Russian Society of American Culture Studies at Moscow State University, where researchers from Trans-Baikal regularly present papers devoted to US Latino/a literary studies. Close scientific cooperation of Trans-Baikal scholars with colleagues from Belarus (Yuri Stulov, chair of the World Literature Department at Minsk State Linguistics University) results in joint projects, publication in American Studies Yearbook and conferences that contribute to further conceptual discussions. Tatyana Voronchenko’s monograph At the Crossroads of the Worlds: Mexican-

American Phenomenon in American Literature is the most significant contribution in Russia devoted to the Mexican-American literary tradition. Published by Moscow State University in 1992, the book employs a diachronic approach that allows the author to depict the first images of Mexican-Americans in the folklore of the Southwest and surveys the evolution of the image of Mexican-Americans in literature. In the heroic genre of corridos, one of the important folkloric traditions that represent models of resistance to Anglo authority and Anglo literary styles, Voronchenko finds an impressive collective image of a fighter for his own rights and the rights of the members of his community. The researcher traces the literary images of Mexican-Americans in works by American writers of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries: Francis Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, Jack London, John Steinbeck, and others. She concludes that the analyzed folklore and literary images challenge

traditional stereotypes and that the literature of the first half of the twentieth century represents the Mexican-American who resists assimilation. Voronchenko presents the system of key themes and images in Chicano literature

of the 1980s. The themes of La Raza and La Raza Cósmica are explored in the poetry of Ricardo Sánchez and Alurista and in the play El Jardín, by Carlos Morton. The researcher emphasizes the philosophical aspect of the problem of the movement of civilizations in Ray González’s and Alurista’s poetry and in Luis Valdez’s plays in which characters feel at the crossroads of the Western and Eastern civilizations. The book develops the idea of mutual penetration of Christian and Indian beliefs and cultures on the literary level. To illustrate this idea, Voronchenko explores the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the novel Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya, and in works by Denise Chávez. She also examines the role of the image of the Sun – the main star of Aztec cosmogony – in works by Rudolfo Anaya, Alurista and Luis Valdez. The author concludes that Chicano literature emerged at the crossroads of cultural traditions – Mexican and Anglo-American – and has its own trajectory of development and a perspective to take its own place in world literature. The second edition of Voronchenko’s book, published by Zabaikalsky State

Pedagogical University in 1998, includes some changes and amendments introduced by the author in accordance with new research materials and remarks made by American and Russian literary critics. It also includes Rudolfo Anaya’s interview and essay translated into Russian. This monograph was followed by a number of articles that opened up new US Latino/a literary names and threw light on some new tendencies in Chicano literature of the 1990s (Voronchenko 2000; 2001; 2010). Siberian researchers find grounds for their analysis in the concept of cultural dia-

logue by Mikhail Bakhtin and Vladimir Bibler, in semiotic notions by Yuri Lotman, in conceptual considerations by Gloria Anzaldúa, Frances R. Aparicio, Homi K. Bhabha, Néstor García Canclini, D. Emily Hicks, Mary Louise Pratt, Renato Rosaldo, José David Saldívar, and others. Notions developed by American and Latin American scholars have become extremely popular and are widely employed to analyze works by bicultural and bilingual Siberian authors and works by Russianspeaking writers from former Soviet republics. The reference to the key concepts of border writing (crossing borders between cultures, multiplicity of languages, strategies of translation rather than representation, refusal of the subject-object opposition) help scholars consider the subjects of their research not only from traditional disciplinary lenses but concentrating on binary movements between the country of origin and the host country and, consequently, on cultural transformations. Moreover, terms aimed at describing sites of contact and exchange (border, contact zone, tropicalization, hybridization) inform new interpretations of already well-known and much-analyzed Russian literary works. A brief look at the corpus of publications by Trans-Baikal researchers reveals that

they fall into several groups: first, papers that highlight the specificities and general tendencies of US Latino/a literature and culture (Voronchenko 1998; 2001; 2010); second, numerous works devoted to certain US Latino/a writers (Marina Maltseva, Sergei Plotnikov, Elena Prineslik, Nikolay Sokolskykh, Elena Gurulyova, Anna Atroschenko); third, articles about US Latino/a literary criticism (Nakaznaya 2005); and fourth, articles that concentrate on comparative analysis of Latino/a and

Russian-speaking national authors, including Siberian poets and writers (Baranova 2006; 2010). Multidisciplinary single-author articles and collections of essays devoted to US Latino/a authors address identity negotiation, gender issues, and genre studies. Articles on US Latino/a literary and cultural studies by Trans-Baikal researchers have appeared in international conference proceedings and in journals published in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Volgograd, Ulan-Ude, Vladivostok, and other parts of Russia. Edited by Voronchenko, the publication The Open World: Multicultural Discourse and Intercultural Communications as a Part of the International Conference on Transborderland in the Changing World resulted from the international conference held in Chita, Trans-Baikal, in 2006 and embraced 43 essays by contributors from Russia (mostly Trans-Baikal) and the US (Francisco A. Lomelí, María Herrera-Sobek, and Maria Teresa Marquez). The journal Translator, published by the Trans-Baikal Regional Branch of the Russia’s Union of Translators in Chita, has a section “Americana” that regularly features papers devoted to US Latino/a literary studies. In 2009, the journal Humanitarian Vector published Francisco A. Lomeli’s article “Border and Memory in Lucrecia Guerrero’s Chasing Shadows,” translated into Russian by Voronchenko and Atroschenko. Recently, there have appeared numerous publications of Trans-Baikal researchers

on Mexican-American literary traditions. The author whose fiction has attracted much attention of Russian scholars for the last two decades is Mexican-American writer Rudolfo Anaya. The Russian translation of Bless Me, Ultima has stimulated interest in his books. Anna Gongadze’s dissertation Synthesis of Cultures in Rudolfo Anaya’s Creativity (Trilogy of the People of Atzlán) (Moscow, 2003) was followed by a scientific project by Sergei Plotnikov (Chita, 2007). His research Artistic Model of the World as an Element of Mexican-American Culture is based on the quartet about Sonny Baca (Zia Summer, Rio-Grande Fall, Shaman Winter, Jemez Spring). In analyzing Anaya’s mystery/detective fiction, Plotnikov underlines the importance of myth and finds elements of calendar, solar, lunar, etiological, cosmogonic, anthropogenic, twin, and flood myths. At the same time the researcher points out that Anaya actively reconstructs and newly interprets original mythological plots and motifs, intentionally enriches them with new philosophical thoughts and rational knowledge and adopts them to decide concrete aesthetic tasks and create new artistic models. Issues pertaining to identity in works by Mexican-American writer Dagoberto

Gilb are addressed in Marina Maltseva’s essays. She explores different factors that shape cultural identity and places the accent on the shifts in gender roles as they are revealed in Dagoberto Gilb’s prose (The Magic of Blood (1993), The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1994), Woodcuts of Women (2001)). In the early works by this Mexican-American writer, women characters form part of the background on which male characters fight and suffer. The writer often neither describes their appearance nor mentions their names, calling them by the structural position in the family (mother, wife, sister, neighbor). Gradually, Gilb’s works accumulate more and more female characters. In all ten stories of Woodcuts of Women the Chicana comes to the foreground, erasing the binary construction of a masculine subject and a feminine object. In Maria de Covina, Dagoberto Gilb portrays a new Chicana, a successful assistant manager of a department store who is building a career. She is capable of making decisions that go beyond stereotypes. Challenging traditional

perceptions of Mexican women, she acts so that a young man, who prefers another woman to her, loses his job. Maltseva emphasizes that “balancing between two cultural stereotypes, a modern emancipated Chicana demonstrates masculine qualities such as independence, freedom, creativity, activity and even aggressiveness” (Maltseva 2002: 112). In exploring different models of fatherhood in Gilb’s short prose, Maltseva locates

her discussion in terms of class and ethnicity and distinguishes the following types of losers among Chicano fathers: escapists (Something Foolish, Nancy Flores, Photographs Near a Rolls Royce), desperate fathers (The Death Mask of Pancho Villa, The Desperado) and those who are still pretending to fight for the happiness of their children but actually are absolutely irresponsible in their illogical actions (The Rat, Look on the Bright Side, Hollywood!, Romero’s Shirt). Maltseva observes that in Dagoberto Gilb’s books, Chicano fathers perform a diminishing role in the family (Maltseva 2011). Nikolay Sokolskykh uses works by Luis Alberto Urrea to illustrate his con-

siderations about local and global phenomena. His research is based on the American Book Award-winning memoir Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life (1998), Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993) and the poetry collection Ghost Sickness (1997). Urrea’s autobiographical character, who encounters psychological and social problems, has to straddle the Mexican world of his mother and the American world of his father. Emphasizing the importance of individual self-construction for Urrea’s characters, Sokolskykh views Urrea’s works also as community-oriented and concerned with the question of social justice. A group of scholars from Trans-Baikal is doing research on the literary produc-

tion of Mexican-American women writers. Anna Atroschenko studies Helena Maria Viramontes’s prose. The objects of her research are The Moths and Other Stories (1985) and Under the Feet of Jesus (1995). The creativity of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, who was the first female Mexican-American author to write in English, is the object of research in Elena Gurulyova’s articles. Much of her work concerns the artistic locus of California and women characters portrayed by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton in the novel The Squatter and the Don (1885). Elena Prineslik’s published articles illuminate the issues touched upon in Ana Castillo’s novels and the specificity of her literary style. She articulates the problem of the generation gap and that of mother-daughter relationships in Castillo’s novel Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999). She analyzes the manifestations of magical realism in Ana Castillo’s novels Sapogonia (1990) and So Far From God (1994). Trans-Baikal researchers of MexicanAmerican women writers’ texts highlight their celebrations of hybridity and attempts to rewrite existing myths by challenging stereotypical portrayals of women. Understanding the heterogeneity of US Latino/a groups, Siberian researchers do

not limit their scholarship to a particular US Latino/a literary tradition. Puerto Rican literature is the focus of attention in works by Elena Nakaznaya. Her articles devoted to this component of US Latino/a literary studies include analysis of Víctor Hernández Cruz’s and Sandra Maria Esteves’s poetry, Judith Ortiz Cofer’s and Esmeralda Santiago’s novels and Aurora Levins Morales’s essays and prose. The polyphonic nature of Puerto Rican poetry is in tune with the modern ten-

dency for strengthening intercultural exchanges in modern society. As the most dynamic form of reflecting reality, poetry has become an integral part of the search

for identity by Puerto Ricans. Víctor Hernández Cruz is known for his brilliant ability to control meanings at the intersection of cultural and linguistic boundaries. His poem “Nabokov” from Maraca: New and Selected Poems (Hernández Cruz 2001) presents a wealth of intertextual devices. Hernández Cruz plays with the motif of transparency and permeability, the leitmotif that goes through many of Vladimir Nabokov’s works. Transparent things are cognizable; non-transparent ones are secret. Various signs of transparency (glass, window, water) are scattered throughout the works of both authors. However, Hernández Cruz reconsiders the existential and cultural category of transparency. The Puerto Rican poet associates the metaphor of transparency with “a magnifying glass.” A bilingual poet has a multidimensional perception of reality. He is able to see and feel what is inaccessible to a man whose identity is not “spread on butterfly wings crossing borders.” Frances Aparicio defines Latino English as “a tropicalized linguistic locus that is listened to/read “differently” (Aparicio 1997: 201). The magnifying glass through which the bilingual writer looks at the world provides an opportunity to newly interpret not only macro-but also micro-images of his heritage. Cruz’s intertextual play with poetic paradigms Lolita-Latino-Capullo and Ada-Ada-ración makes us believe that the poem about Nabokov is the story of Hernández Cruz’s individual poetic style development, where the role of exposure belongs to the familiarity with great literary works and culminates in the acquisition of his individual poetic style, which is informed and enriched by his Latin American heritage. In his interview for the journal Translator, the poet points out that he uses his Puerto Rico island heritage “as a key to open other cultural doors” (Nakaznaya 2006: 100). According to Cruz, a bilingual poet is “the citizen of the words” who appeals to different referential codes, participates in open discursive practices and easily transcends cultural and linguistic borders. The depiction of border time and space is of special interest for Trans-Baikal

researchers. I analyze border time and space in the novel of Judith Ortiz Cofer The Line of the Sun (1989) and stress that the Puerto Rican writer uses an array of literary devices – visual, acoustic, and coloring imagery; a series of motifs; elements of carnival poetics and symbolic representations – to emphasize El barrio’s fragility and instability and presents it as an area of territorial claims, border patrol, the infusion of dynamic and static elements, and other specificities as a border zone (Nakaznaya 2007). Using Yuri Lotman’s terminology, the characters in the novel may be divided into three groups: “the characters of their own place” who carry their closed locus with them (Ramona), “the characters of the path” who follow a certain trajectory in a linear space (Rafael) and “the characters of the steppe” who are able “to cross borders that are compelling to others” (Lotman 1992: 417-18). Special interest arouses in connection with the latter group that is represented by the character of Marisol and her brother Gabriel who navigate between Puerto Rican and American cultures. Their confinement to certain places is suggestive of their “in-betweenness.” Gabriel’s private space is limited to a fire escape. It is a space neither inside nor completely outside, neither on the top nor at the bottom. Using Aurora Levins Morales’s words, it is space where there is “no land feeling at all solid” under the feet (Levins Morales and Morales 1986: 84). The brother and the sister are fond of playing “spatial games.” Sitting on the fire escape, they watch from above how

people move below on the sidewalk in different directions and mentally connect the routes of their travels. These multiple intersections of different trajectories symbolically represent the imaginary country of the borderlands, where different ways of thinking and types of consciousness converge. The notion of cultural memory is very important for US Latino/a writing; that is

why Trans-Baikal scholars pay special attention to this subject. An attempt to present the history of marginalized groups of population determines the artists’ choice of discursive and non-discursive practices. In the paper “Images of Needlework”, Nakaznaya (2010) explores the category of memory in Aurora Levins Morales’s Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriqueñas (1998). The image of needlework occurs in Levins Morales’s Getting Home Alive (written together with her mother Rosario Morales in 1986) as a symbolic means to construct a cultural heritage with roots in Puerto Rican, Jewish, and American cultures. In Remedios, she continues to sew bits and pieces of women’s stories together. The accounts of the lost ancestors are revealed though the images of needlework related to weaving, embroidering, knitting, and sewing female characters. The author rewrites/rereads silent non-verbal women’s texts. When the sphere of female communication is limited to family and restricted by the dominant culture, needlework becomes one of the most important means of feminine existence. In Remedios, these acts of women’s creation are associated not only with women’s domestic duties or accomplishments of their creativity but also with the social protest against the foundations of society and the desire to restore justice. Images of needlework become vivid memorial representations of women in history and culture. Works by Cuban-American writers have aroused much recent interest. The

awarding of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama to Nilo Cruz’s play Anna in the Tropics brought the problems of Cuban-Americans into focus and stimulated international interest in Cruz’s plays. Nakaznaya’s papers presented at international conferences (“Leo Tolstoi and Nilo Cruz: The Issue of Intertextuality” and “The Continuity between Nature and Society in Nilo Cruz’s Drama Anna in the Tropics”) examine different aspects of this play. The latter work traces how changes in the environment cause changes in society. Border theory and environmental literary criticism provide the foundation on which to make sense of Nilo Cruz’s play. The story of Latino/a literature of the United States is important “for a better

understanding of similar cultural processes in other multi-ethnic regions of the world like Siberia” (Voronchenko 2001: 147). The impact of US Latino/a literary criticism is evident in works devoted to the analysis of Siberian writers. In TransBaikal, Buryat and Evenk writers are bicultural and bilingual like US Latino/a authors. Their creativity is influenced by Russian and native cultures. Olesya Baranova attempts to compare national authors who create their works in

Russian with border writers in the US. She explores Siberian literature that draws researchers’ attention because of the heterogeneity of its components. Using works by Gloria Anzaldúa and other border theorists, Baranova analyzes works by Russian-speaking Buryat authors who are in the zone of cultural transgression and whose works are based on the aesthetic border principles. The poetry by Bair Dugarov, Namzhil Nimbuyev, Seseg Namsaraeva and the prose by Vladimir Mitipov encompass many traditional ethnic images. Like US Latino/a writers, they invest

new meanings in given notions and make their literary productions more inclusive. In Bair Dugarov’s poetry, traditional Buryat images of the steppe, mountain, grass, yurt, horse, horse-rider, and dog acquire new interpretations based on the author’s bicultural and bilingual experience (Baranova 2010). A yurt is a portable, felt-covered, wood lattice-framed dwelling structure which is very important for Mongolic nomads as a sacral space. In the poem “A Yurt on the Skyscraper,” Dugarov’s lyrical character wants to build a yurt on the roof of the skyscraper and unite two parts of his split identity. In his search for identity, he undergoes a transformation and tries to overcome fears and uncertainty by combining images of Buryat and Russian cultures. Thus, the growing corpus of publications and scholarship about US Latino/a

authors and criticism in Trans-Baikal confirms that researchers continue to look for new subjects and new ways of interpreting them, demonstrating their commitment to transdisciplinarity. US Latino/a literary studies is a growing field in Siberia. The study of US Latino/a literature in Trans-Baikal opens up new approaches to correlate local and national to global phenomena and enables Siberian scholars to transcend the limits of exceptionally linear narratives and try to imagine them, using José David Saldívar’s words, “more dialogically, in terms of multifaceted migrations across borders” (Saldívar 1997: 1). US Latino/a criticism serves as a conceptual tool to enhance our understanding and to evaluate contemporary literatures that emerge at the crossroads. Works by US Latino/a authors are gaining momentum because they act as bridges to other societies and cultures.