REDEFINING MARGINALITY: DIS-IDENTIFICATION
IN HASTA NO VERTE JESUS MIO

Elena Poniatowska concludes her autobiographical essay, "A Question Mark Engraved on My Eyelids," with a provocative contrast between Mexico and the United States: "Jose Agustin," she says, "once declared that in the United States they believed: 'I'm a shoeshine boy made good.' It would have been better for him to say a 'shoeshine boy made bad.' We have all been made bad, we are all needy, all unwanted guests around the feast, invited at the last minute. In recognizing this lies our creativity."

Poniatowska characterizes her "we" here through the combined metaphors of guest and shoeshine boy, making us party-crashers at the table of life; reminding us of our humble origins so that we might question what "success" is implied in distancing ourselves from these origins. The  author further frames the identity of her "we" in terms of creativity and nationality. Her reference to Jose Agustin places us in the Mexican tradition while the specific quote she chooses from Agustin makes us adapt a North American perspective. "We" is an openly complicated, conflicted pronoun in its usage here, encompassing members of a certain privileged class, a creative community, which is not autoctonous yet is American in the broadest construction of the term. I have chosen to begin my examination of Elena Poniatowska's construction of a national identity with this quote because it condenses many of the author's primary preoccupation which constantly resurface in her work while its self-critical stance--including herself in this group of interlopers--is also typical of Elena Poniatowska.

The primary focus of the essay ("A Question Mark Engraved . . . ") is the relation between the author's "I" and any "we" her sense of belonging which she struggles to obtain through her writing. The writing  experience she identifies as central to her process of self-production in this essay and in several others is that of writing "Hasta no verte Jesus mio". She calls her acquaintance with "Jesusa Palancares," the novel's protagonist, "the fundamental meeting of my life", adding that "because of her I also love being a woman, I who at age 15, wanted to be a man". Poniatowska identities with her protagonist because of their shared gender; one element of her feminist praxis is this presentation of Jesusa in gendered terms juxtaposed to the society which excludes her on all terms. But while Jesusa continually marks her distance from Mexican society, her author is able to find her own sense of national identity through Jesusa's narrative. This paradoxical process leads to a contradictory sense of nationalism, for the community which Poniatowska enters is shown to be a fragmented one. Concentrating on two essays in which Poniatowska discusses the production of Hasta no verte ("A Question Mark . . . "and an essay from Vuelta, 3 which shares the same title as the novel), I will demonstrate how Poniatowska in some ways deconstructs her own authority, dislocating the center through her relation to its margins.

Poniatowska's articles about her most well-known novel can be read to some degree as testimonios about the production of a testimonio (to borrow a phrase from John Beverley). In contrast to the autobiographical stance of "A Question Mark . . .," the Vuelta article begins with Jesusa and situates her in spatial terms: "Alli donde Mexico se va haciendo cada vez mas chaparrito, alli donde las calles se pierden y diluyen y quedan cada vez mas desamparadas . . . " . Poniatows-ka uses an eminently Mexican vocabulary to locate Jesusa on the edge of this society; she is part of the background, the earth: "La Jesusa se parece cada vez mas a la tierra; es un terron que camina, un montoncito de barro que el tiempo macizo y que ahora se ha secado el sol" . Jesusa is hostile to the author's interest in her--"Mire yo trabajo . .reveals the reluctance of her subject without offering us explanations or excuses. In her relation to Poniatowska, Jesusa finds ways to equalize the exchange between interviewer and interviewed, controlling the speed at which she releases information, only occasionally permitting Poniatowska to tape, making her help wash overalls and run errands. This recreation of the process which created the novel discloses elements of the dialogue which subtends Hasta no verte. It also reveals the extent to which the testimonio form requires the self- marginalization of the transcriber/author. Poniatowska must give herself over to her subject in many concrete respects; she is clearly the guest in Jesusa's house. Jesusa Palancares does not adapt easily to the process which results in her fictionalization and, as we see in the Vuelta article, she also rejects the final product: ?Para que quiero yo esto? !Quiteme esta chingadera de aqu i! ?Que no ve que nada mas me estorba?" . On other occasions she tells Poniatowska that the book is full of lies, underlining the author's complete misunderstanding of her subject. She accepts the book when it comes out with the Nino de Atocha on the cover, however, demonstrating two very different apprehensions of the text.

Displaying these different reactions problematizes what we understand to be "culture," exemplifying divergent values and readings which, according to Nestor Garcia Canclini, can form "asymmetrical" relations to the act of writing .With her patron saint on the cover the book has emblematic value for Palancares and, as Cynthia Steele has suggested, the Nino can "watch/preside" over the text Pontiatowska does not attempt to explain these disparities, presenting instead this series of conflicts as the irrevocable basis of her relationship to Jesusa Palancares and, implicitly, our relationship to the protagonist as well. John Beverley, speaking about the connection between informant and interlocutor in the testimonio, has speculated that this relationship may function as an "ideologeme for the possibility of union of a radicalized intelligentsia and the poor and working classes of a country" . What distinguishes testimonio from the novel, according to Beverley, is its crucial questioning of institutionalized literary forms which have performed the work of alienation and domination. The anti-literariness of the testimonio offers us a possible instance of solidarity. Jean Franco, treating the more specific question of the role of the female intellectual, adds a useful proviso to Beverley's proposal reminding us that "speaking as a woman within a pluralistic society may actually reinstitute, in a disguised form, the same relationship of privilege that has separated the intelligentsia from the subaltern classes." Rather than reinstituting this separation of classes by concealing it, Poniatowska's texts about the production of Hasta no verte call attention to the conflictual class relationship behind the testimonial process. This contention becomes the central theme of these reflections on the narrative and, as we will see, these essays highlight the degree to which conflict and resistance are also inscribed in the narrative structure of the book itself.

As the protagonist of a testimonio, Jesusa should be a "representative" voice; but what does she represent in Hasta no verte?. She is a not typical Mexican woman in that, after being forced to marry and becoming a young widow, she never remarries nor wants to have children; she makes her life outside of the family. She enters the traditionally "male" realm when she takes part in the Revolution as cook but also boldly riding and shooting, and later she crosses other gender lines when she drinks and fights with men. I want to suggest that her anomalous behavior makes her perhaps more representative of Mexico, for it enables her to incorporate characteristics society defined as both "masculine" and "feminine." The trajectory of Jesusas life also parallels the vicissitudes of the country and because of the correspondence Hasta no verte can be read as a kind of national Bildungsroman, beginning with a poor youth in a southern province, Jesusas adolescence corresponds to the revolutionary years, and in her twenties she moves to the D.F--echoing post-revolutionary urbanization, she takes on different service and industrial jobs in the city's sprawl. Her maturation coincides with the growth of Mexico, it is condensed in her, giving her a symbolic role in keeping with the demands of modern nationality which, according to Homi Bhabha, is based on seeing "the many as one." Still, in spite of her participation in national history and her representative function in the text, Palancares rejects a national interpellation in the testimonio and again in Poniatowska's reflection on it in Vuelta, she says: "Al fin de cuentas, yo no tengo patria. Soy como los hungaros, de ninguna parte. No me siento mexicana ni reconozco a los mexicanos . . . Si yo tuviera dinero y bienes seria mexicana, pero yo soy peor que la basura pues no soy nada" . By her own definition, her subaltern state offers her no national identity.

It seems odd, then, that Poniatowska finds her sense of Mexican identity through Jesusa Palancares. In the Vuelta article the author reveals that  through the interview process:
Me sentia fuerte de todo lo que no he vivido. . . Lo que crecia o a lo  mejor estaba alii desde hace a¯os era el ser mexicana; el hacerme mexicana; sentir que Mexico estaba adentro de mi y que era el mismo que el de la Jesusa . . . Mis abuelos, mis tatarabuelos tenian una frase clave: "I don't belong." Una noche . . . despues de identificarme largamente con la Jesusa y repasar una a una todas sus imagenes, pude decirme en voz baja: "Si yo pertenezco." One strong element of identification between Poniatowska and her protagonist-augmenting that of gender, is this shared sense of "not belonging." This is the "dis-identification" of my title, a term which comes from the work of Michel Pecheux, offering a third position beyond that of identification and counter identification. Finding these commonalities unites the two women in Poniatowska's essays while it simultaneously heightens awareness of their radically different social positions. Elena Poniatowska, born in France from an aristocratic family, did not even know her mother was Mexican until she was packing to move to that country as a result of the Second World War. She arrived as a stranger to her madre patria, saw it with European eyes, learned its language from the household workers, and longed to be a part of it (for a more detailed account of this experience see La "flor de lis, "Poniatowska's autobiographical novel of her childhood).

The author's relationship with Jesusa Palancares is an extension of this earlier paradoxical encounter with Mexico; through these interviews Poniatowska both comes to terms with her own marginal Mexicanness and confronts her  present-day position with its own alterity, thereby illuminating several different possible connotations of "marginality." The result is both a loosening and a refocusing of the conventional opposition subaltern/hegemonic, revealing unexamined alliances while not smoothing over friction. In her accounts of these exchanges Poniatowska highlights this paradox, creating an alternative version and vision of the nation which emphasizes contention and irreconcilable difference rather than an essential uniformity. She uses two quite different (almost diametrically opposed) "marginal" positions to unsettle a complacent center.
Poniatowska's strategy recalls the ideas of Homi Bhabha who, in his well- known essay, "DissemiNation. . . ." suggests that the "vox populi" articulates "the death-in-life of the idea of the 'imagined community' of the nation" . "Death-in-life" is an oxymoron which Bhabha uses to extend his argument that it is the popular voice which defines, interrogates, antagonizes, and, perhaps, kills off the perceived uniformity of the center. "Death-in-life" suggests at the same time almost the opposite: that it is the death or sacrifice of the pueblo which gives life to the idea of the nation. Bhabha's terms has a special resonance in the case of Hasta no verte for we have seen how Jesusa Palancares' voice creates a new sense of national identity for Elena Poniatowska. Death also structures the narrative life; Hasta no verte begins with an epigraph in which Jesusa speaks about her death and ends with what appears to be part of the same discourse. Her actual death does not occur but her consciousness of it frames the narrative, making  it a "life-in-death." Because of Jesusa's belief in spiritism and reincarnation the death-life nexus is always present--we are reading about the third in a series of lives--yet Jesusas narrative alters the customary meaning of death in Judeo-Christian terms. Her individual death is both meaningless, in terms of its effect on the larger community, her relative "importance" in this social system, and still very significant, for in her translation to fiction Jesusa has in many ways left her anonymity behind (se ha hecho un personaje).

The book's narrative, which communicates the singularity of Jesusa Palancares, is structured by Elena Poniatowska's sense of both her own and her protagonist's identities. Because there are indications of the presence of a listener in the text, as well as in the essays, we must take into account the process of production of Hasta no verte. Calling attention to the conversational nature of this discourse makes the reader question the singular concept of the author (as well as possible generic classifications of the work) and we come to recognize Poniatowska's role as a cultural and class translator. A crucial part of her interpretative function is to disclose the resistance of her subject, the limits of her own comprehension and experience, and the impossibility of her project which we can read as taking part in the "articulation of incommensurability that structures all narratives of identity" . There is a speaker and there are references to  a listener in the book. However, authorship is not a collaboration in this case but a struggle: to give voice, to listen and be heard; it is an effort analogous to our struggle as readers of Palan-cares's life.

Cynthia Steele has called Jesusa's final words to an unnamed interlocutor an "implicit accusation" of her reader; she says, "Ahora ya no chingue. Vayase. Dejeme dormir" . These closing words mirror the tone of the epigraph in which Jesusa defies Poniatowska (and her readers)  to miss her when she's gone, to sustain our interest in her, to understand her life. The protagonist's reproach reminds us of the importance of irreconcilability in the text and in our reading of it; rather than some idealist notion of "postmodern" heterogeneity or the "essentially feminine," Poniatowska leaves us with inevitable friction-- national identity is formed here through complex structures of appreciation and alienation. We might be able to add more specificity now to the end of my original quote from Poniatowska (". . . we are all unwanted guests . . .") and I return to and modify the last sentence of that quote: "In recognizing this [the inevitable disaccord, the conflict between our different positions] lies our creativity." Perhaps also in recognizing this disaccord lies our best opportunity for real  solidarity.

The link between creativity and solidarity is central to Poniatowska's writing. Her process of production is always dialogic and her discourse is enlightened and transformed through its relation to others, whether she has engaged in a literal dialogue (as in Hasta no verte and Gaby Brimmer), a collective conversation (La noche de Tlatelolco or Nada, Nadie: Las voces del temblor), or a figural exchange with others' texts, letters, photographic perspectives, and historical versions of events (Tinisima). Poniatowska is continually stretching familiar forms in order to make them accommodate defiant, often dissenting content. Rather than offer her readers artistically imposed unity or more facile solutions to complex cultural situations, Elena Poniatowska gives us a set of conflicting yet in some aspects unified voices and perspectives. The resulting texts are not simply ethnographic accounts nor cultural/class tourism but more inclusive representations of Mexico's
diversity, not built on homogeneity but on plurality and mutual respect.

Romance Quarterly,  1995. By Jill Kuhnheim