Maria Cristina Mena (later María Cristina Chambers; April 3, 1893 – August 3, 1965) was the author of eleven short stories, five children's books, and a nonfiction article. She is best known for her short stories, published mainly in The Century Magazine and American Magazine from 1913 to 1916. With renewed interest in the history of Mexican-American literature and the publication of all her short fiction in The Collected Stories of María Cristina Mena, her work is now receiving greater consideration.See Leal, Luis. "Maria Cristina Mena." Chicano Writers: Third Series. Ed. Francisco A. Lomeli and Carl R. Shirley. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 209. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. Literature Resource Center. Gale. JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV (MSE LIBRARY). 14 December 2009 here.
Biography Mena was born in Mexico City during the regime of President Porfirio Diaz. She received her early education at an English boarding school where she became fluent in Spanish, English, French, and Italian. Later in her life, Mena learned Braille and converted a variety of works, including her own children's literature, into Braille as part of her advocacy work for the blindSchuller, Kyla. "Facial Uplift: Plastic Surgery, Cosmetics And The Retailing Of Whiteness In The Work Of María Cristina Mena." Journal of Modern Literature (2009): p. 82-104. JSTOR. Web. 8 Dec. 2014. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.2979/jmodelite.32.4.82.pdf?&acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=true>. Daughter to a “politically powerful and socially prominent” family, she was sent to New York City in 1907 to escape the political tensions that led to the Mexican Revolution. Six years later, Mena published her first short stories in The Century Magazine and American Magazine. She continued to write for them until 1916, when she married playwright and journalist Henry Kellet Chambers. Mena did not produce any writings between 1916 and 1942, apart from her posthumously published correspondence with D.H. Lawrence. In 1942 Mena published the first of five children's books under her married name, Maria Cristina Chambers, the last of which was published in 1953. Her final publication in The Texas Quarterly, “Afternoons in Italy with D.H. Lawrence,” was printed the year before her death at seventy-two.See Doherty, Amy. Introduction. The Collected Stories of Maria Cristina Mena. By Maria Cristina Mena. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 1997. vii-l.
Century Magazine Mena reached an audience of predominantly middle- and upper-class white Americans by writing for The Century Magazine, which in quality and quantity was among the leading general monthly periodicals at the time. Increased immigration during the early twentieth century challenged the magazine's erudite readership, who struggled for a distinctive national identity; Century editors responded by publishing fiction that encouraged xenophobia and domestic homogeneity, or what they termed a “common quality.” Articles in Century promoted an exotic and demeaning view of foreign cultures through focus on negative stereotypes; photographs and illustrations lent seeming authenticity to these depictions. The notion that Mena supported Century's perspective is refuted by the veiled social commentary of her short stories, and more explicitly, in her letters to the editors, in which she fights to include authentic elements of Mexican tradition in her work.See Doherty, xvii-xxix.
Critical reception Biographers Amy Doherty and Luis Leal differ in how they portray Mena and her work. Whereas Doherty emphasizes Mena's success as a Mexican-born, woman writer who published in English-language publishing houses (periodicals) that mainly catered to White audiences, Leal emphasizes the controversies in her technique of depicting Mexicans. Doherty portrays Mena as an “interpreter and a critic” whose literature was able to satiate America's fascination with Mexicans. She lists Mena's short stories, naming the magazine each work featured in and providing a short summary of its predominant themes. This list creates the impression that Mena was a very prolific writer.Doherty, Amy. "Mena, María Cristina (1893–1965).." The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latino Literature [Three Volumes]. Ed. Nicolás Kanellos. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2008. ABC-CLIO eBook Collection. Web. 9 Dec 2014.
Leal's depiction of Mena challenges this notion. Leal notes that because Mena used her married name Chambers, she was overlooked as a Chicano writer until writers like Raymund Paredes discovered her stories. Paredes criticized Mena's condescending view of the Indians in Mexico. He refers to Mena as a “talented story-teller whose sensibility unfortunately tended towards sentimentalism and preciousness.” Leal interprets Paredes’ comment to convey that Mena's “decorum“ in depicting the plight of Indians made her work have a “trivial and condescending” attitude towards Indians. In consequence, Leal argued, her work lacked a necessary force against Mexico's ruling class. Leal's presentation of Mena confines her success to her numerous publishing in a competitive market and highlights her shortcomings in her attempt to correct the misrepresentation of Indians in the fiction circulating in the U.S.Leal, Luis. "Maria Cristina Mena." Chicano Writers: Third Series. Ed. Francisco A. Lomeli and Carl R. Shirley. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 209. Literature Resource Center. Web. 10 Dec. 2014.
Major themes
Stereotypes
Mena uses sentimental stereotypes of Mexican Indians, white Mexicans, and American tourists alike throughout her stories. She wrote during a time when people were “wary of the machine age many thought the U.S. was moving into” such that “commentators increasingly focused on Indians from both sides of the border as an antidote to the soulless impulse of modernity”.See Padilla, Yolanda (2004). Indian Mexico: The changing face of indigeneity in Mexican American literature, 1910--1984. Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Chicago, United States -- Illinois. Retrieved December 10, 2009, from Dissertations & Theses: Full Text (Publication No. AAT 3149349). According to Yolanda Padilla, “Mena’s stories often attribute a picturesque, serene, and sage quality to the Indians that echoes such sentiments.” Mena frequently describes Mexican locals as immature children or animals.Padilla, 51. For example, in “John of God,” Dolores is depicted as a “chattering little squirrel of a wife”.Mena, Maria C., The Collected Stories of Maria Cristina Mena. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 1997, 21. Mena recalls the concept of a noble savage in describing Petra's voice “with all its tenderness holding a hint of barbaric roughness,” or revealing Miss Young's thoughts of her Mexican hosts as “a warmer, wilder people, with gallant gestures and languorous smiles” in “The Gold Vanity Set”.Mena, 1, 51.
Although critics generally dismiss Mena as a “local color” writer of “obsequious” characters, Mena deconstructs these stereotypes by using them to critique their proponents.Doherty vii. In “The Gold Vanity Set” Don Ramon says of the Indians “We use the diminutive because we love them”.Mena, 3. As T. Arab explains, “Don Ramón’s misrepresentation of the Indio continues with a series of ethnic generalizations that underscore the stereotyping of the indigenous peoples by the U.S. and Mexican upper-classes as uncivilized, emotional, irrational and child-like”.See Arab, T. Cultural identity revisited: Early twentieth-century women's work of cultural preservation (Maria Cristina Mena, Humishuma, Sui Sin Far and The Daughters of Hawai'i). Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas, United States -- Kansas. Retrieved December 2, 2009, from Dissertations & Theses: Full Text. (Publication No. AAT 3277878). Similarly, in “The Education of Popo,” Alicia Cherry, judges the Mexican way of life on an American scale: “The summer flirtation of our happy land simply cannot be acclimated south of the Rio Grande. These people lack the necessary imperturbability of mind…”.Mena, 59. Arab comments on Mena's “emphasis on Alicia’s tourist attitude, as well as her interest in consumption” and explains that “At the story’s conclusion Mena manages to display her white characters’ cultural shortsightedness by allowing them to voice their own ethnic self-importance.Arab, 38. The frivolity and patronizing natures of Alicia and Don Ramon diminish the authority behind their stereotyped view of Mexican natives.
In spite of references such as Miss Cherry's to Mexico's “picturesque atmosphere” in “The Education of Popo,” Mena's cast of characters explicitly avoid being confined to this stereotypical framework.Mena, 53. Popo does not fit into Alicia Cherry's conception of a “summer flirtation” and he ultimately refuses to be framed by Alicia's lips, either by the deceptive words emanating from them or by an actual kiss. More obviously, Petra in “The Gold Vanity Set” rebels against Miss Young's desire to commodify her ‘picturesqueness’ by refusing to be photographed, and the Senorita in “The Vine Leaf” blots out her face in the esteemed painting that would literally put her figure in a frame. Even within the painting, the smudging from the face creates a “rude rubbing that in some places has overlapped the justly painted frame of the mirror”.Mena, 91. Margaret Toth explains: “Mena implicitly destabilizes the status of the image as bearer of truth. That is, she exposes images—including the photograph, which tends to carry an objective truth value—as manipulable, biased, and, therefore, suspect”.See Toth, Margaret. "Framing the Body: Imperialism and Visual Discourse in María Cristina Mena's Short Fiction." Legacy 26.1 (2009): 92-118. Project MUSE. Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Baltimore, Md. 11 June 2009. Just as the frames cannot contain the characters, so do stereotypes ultimately fail to describe real people.
Mena doesn’t trust images to represent something (especially a group of people) and there's evidence of her distaste in many of her works, such as in “The Vine-Leaf” where she subtly denounces vision and art-especially when used to describe or represent a woman's body. More so, this article argues that Mena doesn’t “trust” that art and images are truthful representations of reality and Toth manages to describe her position without being completely biased to her own opinions. This source can help delve deeper to answer more questions about how Mena shares these ideas through her characters and just how far her stand against imperialism goes.Toth, Margaret A. "Framing the Body: Imperialism and Visual Discourse in María Cristina Mena's Short Fiction." Legacy 26.1 (2009): 92-118. ProQuest. Web. 10 Dec. 2014.