Moving beyond the mint green walls: An examination of (auto)biography and border in Ruth Behar's Translated Woman

Ethnology . . . [forms] a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question, of criticism and contestation of what may seem, in other respects, to be established.-Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

The face that is so other bears the mark of a crossed threshold that irremediably imprints itself as peacefulness or anxiety. Whether perturbed or joyful, the foreigner's appearance signals that he is "in addition." The presence of such a border [is] internal to all that is displayed.

-Julia Kristeva, Strangers To Ourselves

Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story was published in 1993, the outcome of American ethnographer Ruth Behar's visits to the dusty town of Mexquitic, which lies eight hundred kilometers south of the border between Mexico and the United States. Her visits began in the winter of 1982 and continued into the fall of 1989, and on each return to America she carried with her tape-recorded talks with Esperanza Hernandez, a Mexican peasant woman.1 Through the text we learn of Esperanza's childhood, spent in poverty and neglect, being shuffled between her parents and paternal grandmother, enduring violence and abuse at the hands of her drunkard father. Receiving little or no education, she works from the age of ten at jobs such as cooking, cleaning, and housekeeping. Her marriage at eighteen to Julio continues the exploitation, as his abusive womanizing and violence establishes a sixteen-year ordeal in which Esperanza's coraje, or rage, is provoked, and she loses six children to malnutrition. Esperanza emerges, however, as stronger and more independent than this prototype account would have us believe: After years of suffering abuse she turns her husband in to the local judge who sentences him for adultery, and she combats Julio's mother's vindictive retaliation with the aid of an androgynous spiritualist. Behar's intimate perspective allows us to see Esperanza's defiance of Mexican rural codes, as she takes a lover after leaving her husband and supports herself as a street peddler and practitioner of women's magic.

Behar, Esperanza's storyteller, first encountered her anthropological subject on the Day of the Dead in 1983, when she attempted to photograph Esperanza and was instead confronted by the latter's sharp tongue. From this beginning a gradual, and on Behar's side initially tentative, compradazgo relationship developed in which Behar and her husband eventually became the spiritual coparents, or godparents, of Esperanza's children. This bond became the precondition for Esperanza's cooperation in confiding her story to Behar, as night after night, between 1985 and 1989, Esperanza came to Behar's door under cover of darkness to "confess" her life story. She confided that while her local neighbors would only laugh at her pretensions of having a life worth telling, an American audience across the border might recognize the intrinsic value of her story and be conscious of and sensitive to the problems that might arise should her neighbors learn of the more intimate bond between herself and the privileged gringa. Being in turn listener and then storyteller of Esperanza's story caused Behar to examine the ambivalences and contradictions that she feels as a Cuban American woman attempting to reconcile the expectations of her middle-class traditional family and the professional requirements of the academic world. Thus, what emerges is not simply an anthropological account of the Mexican peasant woman's life, but a constructed mirroring of the lives of the two women, so that the ethnographer's voice is not only revealed to us but also makes itself vulnerable to the reader through its own intimate confessions.

Behar remolds Esperanza's story into a frame that would both meet academic requirements and allow for her own voice to be heard. Thus in Part One, "Coraje/Rage," we learn of Esperanza's childhood and marriage, the loss of her children, and her subsequent struggle for independence. In Part Two, "Esperanza/ Redemption," we listen to Esperanza's stories of her conflicts with her family and living children, and her struggles over property and land. Part Three, titled "Literary Wetback," discusses the problems of turning Esperanza's taped stories and conversations into a book and opens out even farther on Behar's own preoccupations and anxieties, which are fully articulated in Part Four, "Reflejos/Reflections," where the ethnographer allows Esperanza's story to fall into the background of her own awakened concerns about the academy and her identity. Each chapter begins with a selection of quotations from various thinkers and writers, ranging from Walter Benjamin to Chicana and Latina writers Sandra Cisneros and Gloria Anzaldua. Following the quotations there is an italicized section in Behar's own words, setting the scene and describing either her own anticipation at the coming encounter with Esperanza or ruminating over the previous conversation. From the outset, then, Behar's voice is clear and present as she speaks about her feelings at the progression of the relationship.