Leanna Boychenko, Loyola University, Chicago
María Cristina Mena (1893-1965) is the first Mexican-American woman whose short fiction gained wide American readership. Her stories have largely been dismissed as simple and unchallenging, pandering to an American audience by depicting a stereotyped Mexico filled with naïve Mexicans. Recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated that her works can be read as pieces of opposition and resistance (Sheffer 2013; Toth 2013).
In this paper, I explore another layer of complexity in Mena’s fiction through her use of Classical myth, literature, and history in her stories “The Sorcerer and General Bisco” (1915) and “A Son of the Tropics” (1931). Alongside direct classical references, Mena uses significant names to imbue her writing with messages about colonialism, nationalism, and Mexican identity. I argue that Mena undermines traditional views of masculine heroism embodied by figures like Achilles and Julius Caesar. Instead, she promotes a new kind of hero, often a woman, whose outward-appearing weakness hides true strength. Mena pulls in the Classical past to critique traditional heroism, reworking old stories to create intricate, nuanced depictions of Mexico in all its complexity.
I begin with “The Sorcerer and General Bisco,” demonstrating how Mena subverts her audience’s expectations. She does this first with the tale’s title, which focuses on the antagonist (the sorcerer) and whom you might expect to be the protagonist (Bisco). Instead, the story opens with the love story of two runaways, Carmelita and Aquiles. Even here, Aquiles fails to live up to his Classical namesake, Achilles, while Carmelita is the true hero of the story. Her name, a diminutive derived from Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, sounds timid and candy-sweet, but only she has the strength to break the sorcerer’s spell and save the day.
Next, I turn to “A Son in the Tropics,” in which Don Rómulo returns to his hacienda to find a revolt led by his illegitimate son, Rosario. When we meet Rosario, he is learning how to use a typewriter by transcribing Plutarch’s Lives. He first extols Julius Caesar as an exemplum of effective generalship before later praising Brutus’ killing of Caesar for the sake of liberty. The story’s contrasting worlds are marked by names: Rosario (“rosary”) is the son of Remedios, a shortened form of “Our Lady of Remedies,” who is closely linked to Spanish conquest and later, Mexico’s Revolutionary War of 1810-1821 (Ayluardo 1994; Curcio-Nagy 1996). Don Rómulo’s name (Romulus) marks him as coming from an older, outdated world. The contrasting women in the story are Rómulo’s daughter Dorotea, named after a martyred virgin, and Tula, a revolutionary demolitionist with a Nahuatl name.
Mena’s significant names highlight tensions in the overlapping identities which compound Mexican culture: Spanish, indigenous, and mestizo (mixed). By giving her characters a mixture of native and Christian names along with names from classical literature, Mena draws attention to the lasting footprint of colonialization, especially the displacement of native religion with Catholicism. Mena builds a complex portrait of a palimpsestic Mexico whose underestimated heroes demand critical analysis.