Reclaiming Wounds

Personal Narratives and Collective Memory in Norma Elía Cantú's Autobiographical Writing

Abstract

In her writing, Norma E. Cantú problematizes the dimensions of the autobiographical genre by way of placing it at the border between two nations. Border life-writing is constructed as collective, creative, and above all wounded by the colonial and Western experience. Far from exhibiting rage or mere nostalgia, Cantú claims for memory and historical inscription as the means to empower otherwise forgotten and colonized bodies and subjectivities. In so doing, she sets out new modalities of self-representation that aim at re-membering the racialized and gendered bodies at one and other side of the border. Through a display of border crossings and historical recollections, Cantú ultimately exhorts readers to delve into the border wound as though it were a threshold into a particular subjectivity. In analyzing three of her works, Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (2015), Cabañuelas, A Novel (2019), and Meditación Fronteriza: Poems of Love, Life, and Labor (2019), this essay seeks to establish bounds between Cantú’s autobiographical writing and feminist theories of mestizaje (Anzaldúa, 2012), performative self-representation and autobiographics (Gilmore, 1994), nomadism and mobile diversity (Braidotti, 2011), and third spaces (Bhabha, 1994), that will problematize and push the autobiographical genre to its very limits.