THE CHOLA LOCA IN LANDSCAPES OF STRUGGLE: BREAKING SILENCE IN THE WORKS OF HELENA MARÍA VIRAMONTES AND YXTA MAYA MURRAY

The struggle of reimagining and resituating once ignored or vilified female icons is an example of how Chicanas turn to the past to instill a new meaning to female archetypes. In breaking silence, Helena María Viramontes and Yxta Maya Murray found a way to make the Chola visible, and a voice from which she could speak about the concerns of women living la vida loca in urban landscapes. The analysis of Chicana representations, of the Chola and la vida loca thus offers a counter-narrative to the dominant narratives offered by Chicano texts but also to the rise of representations about Cholas/Cholos in dominant society toward the end of the 20th century. In this dissertation project I examine the written expressions of the Chola and the queer Vato by Chicana feminist writers to analyze how women utilize counter-narratives to express lived realities and to negotiate new understandings on issues of gender roles, identity and shifting social urban conditions. The analysis of how women offer alternative descriptions of the Chola as Malfloras and Locas, symbols of women gone bad and crazy, provides the context from which to study how women create alternative forms of expression through and by the appropriation of a tough male aesthetic to re-inscribe the Cholas as empowered women. The recuperation of the Cholas sliced tongue and silent scream in women's literary representation thus offers an alternative refiguring of the Chola figure as a speaking subject. This study also emphasizes how Chicana feminists recuperate and reinscribe the Chola to provide new interpretations of the Chola as an agent of resistance and opposition and to express what Yvonne Yarbro Bejarano terms 'the reversal of an accepted image' ('The Lesbian Body,' 183). Feminist writers' development of an emblem of resistance, as a strategic tool to code the Chola with new meaning proves to be 'more complex than rejection, for such strategies both critique and derive power' from the reversal and repositioning o