It would behoove us to realize that back in 1982 we simply did not have the abundance of titles by Cisneros, Castillo, Chavez, Serrano, Pena, Luna Lemus, Gaspar de Alba, Moraga etc., that we have now. At that time in our literary history, our voices were muted by sexist, cultural, and economic censorship. So when Portillo Trambley’s Rain of Scorpions was published by Tonatiuh International in 1975, she was touted as “a historic figure” and “the first Chicana to have a book published of her own literary works.” This was, to a certain extent, true.
In the 1970s, Chicana writers of my generation were honing and studying and reading and preparing for what was to be our emergence in the 1980s. We were young, active, and believed in literature as a tool for social change. Many of us were Affirmative Action students and for the first time in Chicano/a history, there was a substantial block of us attending college. On the other hand, Portillo Trambley was close to fifty. Not that it mattered—this age difference—until I began to think about the shared silence the very next day over our breakfast and right before Portillo Trambley and Cervantes were scheduled to read.
I realized the silence between us was not caused by uncommon interests—here we were: three Chicana writers, two of us fiction writers, and yet over our scrambled eggs and tortillas we shared very little, if nothing more than pleasantries. One type of silence is jet lag, awkward and forgiving. But this silence, the one at our table, spoke of a deep absence, a standstill silence like the long, noticeable, and worrisome pauses between heartbeats. Now, as I stand on the fiftieth rung of life’s ladder, my point of vision has been made clearer. From here, I can see why that breakfast silence disturbed me so. Back then, way back then, there was only Estela Portillo Trambley.
Her Chicano male counterparts, such as fiction writers Rolando Hinojosa and Rudolfo Anaya, were visible (published) and vocal within our community. But the Chicana fiction writer’s marginalization is reflected in Bruce-Novoa’s Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview. Only two out of the fourteen authors he interviewed were women, and only one, Portillo Trambley, wrote fiction. Before the wonderful work of Chicana/o scholars rediscovering texts and finding out that there was “a long tradition of literary antecedents in English before Portillo Trambley” (Rebolledo, 24), Chicana writers of my own generation like Sandra Cisneros and Cherrie Moraga were writing, but we were barely getting to know one another through chapbooks, letters, and mimeographs. Indeed, Portillo Trambley may have been a historic figure, not because she might have been the first, but because she was the only one of her generation. It was not only a lonely position to be in, but the question also rises, why was that so?
In her groundbreaking work Silences, Tillie Olsen was quick to remind us why women are circumvented from writing:
. . .bent (far more common then we assume) circumstances, time, development of craft but beyond that: how much conviction as to the importance of what one has to say, one’s right to say it. And the will, the measureless store of belief in oneself to be able to come to. . .to find the form for one’s own life comprehensions. Difficult for any male not born into a class that breeds such confidence—almost impossible for a girl, a woman.
There is nothing new in what I am about to say: a woman writer’s impulse to write is muted by her economic conditions. “I hate to always talk about money,” Portillo Trambley said in Bruce-Novoa’s 1980 interview, “but when you’re poor, you have to worry about groceries.” (Bruce-Novoa, 166) Here was Portillo who married right out of high school, which puts the marriage around 1954 (the year I was born) and found herself without a community of Chicana writers. Portillo Trambley realized from early on that she:
“belonged to a generation when we didn’t have enough people. . .I was the only Chicana fighting the political cause. Not a single Chicano backed me up. The only ones who did were the. . .Jewish political science professors from UT El Paso, or the Jewish Women’s League. Chicanos were mobilizing but not in El Paso. . .Back then there was only Estela Portillo and the John Birch Society who wanted to lynch me.” (Bruce-Novoa, 174)
Culturally, women are trained to think of their desires last, especially those desires that call for a detachment from their families and other obligations. Tey Diana Rebolledo reaffirms the sentiment and speaks for all women when she writes “for women growing up in a culture that taught them that to survive, you should not speak out, and that your loyalty was to your family and the collectivity, not to yourself as an individual, writing is a subversive act.” (Rebolledo, 8) Portillo Trambley proved to survive by the nature of her very contradiction—she was, for the most part, a 1950s woman who never saw herself as a feminist and stated “I have to be a mother until the children can fly on their own and before I can do anything.” (Bruce-Novoa, 169) And yet she was one of the most subversive women of her time. It’s remarkable that Portillo Trambley accomplished so much work, read so much, became a political talk show host, then a cultural television show host, then became resident dramatist at a local college—all while raising six children. It’s also to her credit that she survived the death of her only son and continued on with writing plays and fiction. That she accomplished much of it, for the most part, by herself, without financial security and without cultural support, is simply astonishing, and speaks volumes of her profound determination and inexhaustible energy to express and explore the lives of women.
And yet, by the time her novel Trini was published in 1986, she was almost all but ignored. Had there been such a political gap between Portillo Trambley and my generation of writers? Perhaps the novel came right in the middle of the eighties in which Chicanas, wrote scholar Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano in the Introduction to The Moths and other Stories, “were riding a wave of creative expression that carries them to the forefront in the field of literary creativity in the United States.” Or perhaps the publication of Cherrie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years in 1983 and Gloria Anzaldúa’s revolutionary Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza in 1986 (a text that was undoubtedly one of the most influential works in Chicana feminism) may have overshadowed Portillo Trambley’s novel. Indeed, if one would have to choose between a revolutionary work, which addressed a universal borderlands history that belonged uniquely to us, and a conventional, episodic novel about the border, it seemed Portillo Trambley’s Trini lost.
Nor was her work awarded the full scholarly attention it rightly deserved. In a scathing and cheaply reductive reading of her work, scholar Juan Rodriguez wrote that Portillo Trambley was:
. . .more concerned with the struggle of women against men without regard for distinction in social class, race or ethnicity. That her characters at times are Spanish-looking or sounding is coincidental to her main concern. In an inflated style that verges on pomposity she presents an almost separatist view of the relationship between men and women. In her effort to write about universal themes she loses the specificity of reference so prevalent in other Chicano writers of the 1970’s. Our writers will do well to carefully consider that path before embarking upon it in the next decade.” (Rodriguez, 44)
Why did we not appreciate the scope and landscape that Portillo Trambley covered so visually and sensually in the novel? The themes that Portillo Trambley chose to write about were the thematic landscape of Chicana imaginary space. The novel encompasses the first twenty or so years of the young protagonist Trini and her efforts to claim a piece of land in which to call her own and make root, both metaphorically and literally. Encountering both her poverty and gender restrictions throughout her journey, in the end she crosses the border into El Paso for a second time and achieves her lifelong dream, only to realize that she remains personally unfulfilled. The novel speaks of immigration and the heartache of leaving a childhood home and wandering off to the unknown, the hostile, all for the mere promise of ownership of some kind, of some sort; the mestizaje, a term and a concept and historical fact that motivated a vast array of the arts to attempt to express and respond; the conflict of religion as symbolized in “the statue of the Virgin Mary and the brown clay figure