[Last week commenced National Hispanic Heritage Month, which like all of our commemorations during this craptastic year is particularly fraught. But they’re also occasions to better remember inspiring American histories and communities, so this week I’ll highlight a handful of Hispanic women’s stories that can help us do just that. Leading up to a weekend tribute to scholars we should all read!]
On two hugely distinct stages in a complex career and life, and how we can put them in conversation.
Born in Mexico City in 1893 and educated at an English boarding school there, María Cristina Mena was sent by her parents to New York City in 1907. There, the precociously talented Mena began publishing short stories when she was just 20, with eleven appearing in the national publications The Century Magazine and American Magazine between 1913 and 1916. These hugely complex short fictions tended to focus on Mexican and Mexican American young women, and feature a range of cultural and gendered themes including conflicts between tradition and modernity, the pull and dangers of assimilation for Mexicans living in the United States, religious and social mores around sexuality, beauty standards and plastic surgery, and more. It’s quite possible to read Mena’s short stories as playing into Anglo prejudices and narratives, as does her fellow Mexican American writer Raymund Paredes (who rediscovered her stories in the 1970s); but equally possible to analyze them as countercultural and subversive, a perspective supported by the letters Mena wrote to the magazines’ editors arguing for keeping authentic portrayals of Mexican traditions in these stories for middle-class white audiences.
In 1916 Mena married Henry Kellett Chambers, described in her 1965 obituary as “an editor of the old Literary Digest, who was also an author and dramatist.” Apparently his journalist and literary career was enough to sustain them (perhaps with the help of her family’s fortune), as Mena did not publish any writing between 1916 and 1942. In that latter year she reemerged to publish, under the name Maria Cristina Chambers, The Water-Carrier’s Secrets, the first of five children’s books that she would publish between 1942 and 1953’s Boy Heroes of Chapultepec: A Story of the Mexican War. These were prominent publications in that genre to be sure (the first four were published in New York by Oxford University Press, the fifth by the well-known Philadelphia publisher of children’s and religious books John C. Winston); but because they were published under her non-Hispanic married name, it was easy to read them as an outsider’s perspective on and portrayal of their Mexican cultural and historical subjects. Even when we know that Mena was their author, what I’ve seen of her children’s books does reflect a very distinct sensibility from those earlier short stories.
Writing careers, like lives and identities, can of course change over time, and it’s entirely understandable if both decades living in the United States and a fifty-year marriage to an Anglo man shifted Mena’s identity and her portrayals of Mexican and Mexican American subjects alike. But at the same time, I would argue that it’s equally possible to read her children’s books through the same countercultural and subversive lens that I noted for her short stories—perhaps not in their specific subject matter or tones toward it, but at least in their existence at all, in her use of this genre (one that was becoming more mainstream and popular in the mid-20th century) to reach new potential readers. Young audiences, it’s worth noting, who could through reading these children’s books become more like young Mena herself had been, in Mexico City and New York City alike: connected to both the United States and Mexico, multilingual as well as -cultural, educated in and influenced by the stories and traditions of these North American neighbors. I can think of few effects that would be more worth highlighting and celebrating for National Hispanic Heritage Month.
Next story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Hispanic histories you’d highlight?
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