| secretarial labor. For years no one questioned this gender monopoly, because it differed little from the general state of society everywhere and alwaysor at least as we were trained to think of it before feminist critics began to alter our perception of normality. Professor Lawhn, however, was disturbed by what to most seemed the natural state of things. As we worked side by side, squinting at the mind-numbing glare of microfilm screens, she would intone what became the leitmotif of the research: where were the women? Her question, of course, is the archetypal feminist inquiry, from which springs what has imposed itself as the most dynamic line of critical renovation in contemporary cultural studies. |
| To the patriarchal assertion that there were no women writers, Lawhn responded by finding Olga Beatriz Torres. Then, she set out to make the text available, translating it for the English reading public. But her work, of necessity, goes beyond discovery and promotion, because the reader's first reaction to the thin text could well be that it offers little of interest, that nothing special happens, and, worse, that the seemingly direct writing is of no particular significance. True, the text is sparse, simple, somewhat like a first draft of what might have been a more developed and fleshed-out text had the author been encouraged to rewritethat is, had editors taken a serious interest in her work. That they would have if the text had been by a man we will never know, but perhaps. Yet Professor Lawhn refuses to allow the work to be dismissed or once again given short shrift. She determinedly makes us see what to her is obvious: this simple story contains the paradigm of the Mexican immigrant experience, the movement across political borders that produces, almost despite the immigrant's conscious intentions, a new, hybrid being, what we now call a Chicano/Chicana. Moreover, she purposefully positions Torres's story of cultural accommodation and fusion in direct opposition to the ideology of cultural resistance espoused by Torres's male contemporaries in the |
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