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Dating for expats info. A glance can freeze us i n place ; it can "possess" us. I t can erect a barrier against the world. But i n a glance also lies awareness, knowledge. These seemingly contradictory aspects-the act of bei ng seen, held immobil i zed by a glance, and "seeing through" an experience-are symbolized by the underground aspects of Coatlicue, Cihuacoatl, and Tlazolteotl which cluster i n what I call the Coatlicue state.

El secreto terrible y la rajadura Shame is a wound felt from the inside, dividing us both from ourselves and from one another. By the worried look on my parents' faces I learned early that something was fundamentally wrong with me. When I was older I would look into the mirror, afraid of mi secreto terrible, the secret sin I tried to conceal-la seiia, the mark of the Beast. I was afraid it was in plain sight for all to see.

I fel t alien, I knew I was alien. I was the mutant s toned out of the herd, something deformed with evil inside. She has this fea r that s he h a s n o names that she has many names that she doesn't know her names She has this fear that she's an image that comes and goes clearing and darkening the fear that she's the dreamwork inside someone else's skull She has this fear that if she takes off her clothes shoves her brain aside peels off her skin that if she drains the blood vessels strips the flesh from the bone flushes out the marrow She has this fear that when she does reach herself turns around to embrace herself a lion's or witch' s or serpent's head will turn around s wallow her and grin She has this fea r that if she digs into herself she won't find a nyone that when she gets "there" s he won't find her notches on the trees the birds will have eaten all the crumbs She has this fear that she won't find the way back She felt shame for being abnormal.

The bleedi ng distanced her from others. Her body h ad betrayed her. She could not trust her instincts, her " horses," because they stood for her core self, her dark Indian self. Her soft belly exposed to the sharp eyes of everyone; they see, they see. Their eyes penetrate her; they slit her from head to bel ly. She is at their mercy, s he can do nothing to defend herself. And she is ashamed that they see her so exposed, so vulnerable.

She has to learn to push their eyes away. She has to still her eyes from looking at their feel i ngs-feelings that can catch her in their gaze, bind her to them.

Ya veras, tan bajo que me he caido. Ay mama, tan bajo que me he caido. Esa Gloria, la que niega, la que teme correr desenfrenada, la que tiene miedo renegar al papel de victima. Esa, la que voltea su cara a la pared descascarada. Mira, tan bajo que se ha caido. Ya vez, tan bajo que me he caido.

Se enmudecen mis ojos al saber que la vida no se entrega. Mi pecado no es la rebeldia ni el anajamiento. Es que no ame mucho, que anduve indecisa y a la prisa, que tuve poca fey no Jui dispuesta de querer ser lo que soy. Traicione a mi camino. A qui nomas encerrada en mi cuarto, sangrandome la cara con las ufias. Esa Gloria que rechaza entregarse a su destino. Quiero contenerme, no puedo y desbordo.

Vas ha ver lo alto que voy a subir, aqui vengo. No telephone, no television, no radio. Alone with the presence in the room. Me, my psyche, the Shadow-Beas t? During the dark side of the moon something in the mirror catches my gaze, I seem a l l eyes a nd nose. I ns ide my skull something shifts.

I "see" my face. Gloria, the everyday face; Prieta and Prietita, my childhood face s ; Gaudi, the face my mother and sister and brothers know. And there in the black, obsidian mirror of the Nahuas is yet another face, a s tranger's face.

Simultaneamente me miraba la cara desde distintos angulos. Y mi cara, como la realidad, tenia un caracter multiplice. Between the two eyes in her head, the tongueless magical eye a nd the loquacious rational eye, was la rajadura, the abyss that no bridge could span.

Separated, they could not visit each other and each was too far away to hear what the other was saying. Silence rose like a river a nd could not be held back, it flooded a nd drowned everything. I have no protection. So I cultivate needles, nettles, razor-sharp spikes to protect myself from others.

There are many defense strategies that the self uses to escape the agony of inadequacy a nd I have used all of them. I have split from a nd disowned those parts of myself that others rej ected. I have used rage to drive others away and to insulate myself against exposure. I have reciprocated with contempt for those who have roused shame in me. I have i nternalized rage and con tempt, one part of the self the accusatory, persecutory, j udgmental using defense strategies against a nother part of the self the object of contemp t.

As a person, I, as a people, we, Chicanos, blame ourselves, hate ourselves, terrorize ourselves. Most of this goes on u nconsciously; we only know that we are hurting, we suspect that there is something "wrong" with us, somethi ng fundamentally "wrong. One's attention cannot be captured by someth i ng else, one does not "see" a nd awareness does not happen. One remains ignorant of the fact that one is afraid, and that it i s fear that holds one petrified, frozen i n stone.

If we can't see the face of fear in the mirror, then fea r must not be there. The feel ing is censored a nd erased before it registers in our consc10usness. If it sticks around after having outlived its usefulness, we become "stuck" in it and it takes possession of us. But we need to be arrested. Some past experience or condition has created this need. This stopping is a survival mechanism, but one which must vanish when it's no longer needed if growth is to occur.

We need Coatlicue to slow us up so that the psyche can assimilate previous experiences a nd process the changes. If we don't take the time, she'll lay us low with an illness, forci ng us to " rest. Let the wound caused by the serpent be cured by the serpent. The soul uses everything to further its own maki ng. Our greatest disappointments and painful experiences-if we can make meaning out of them-can lead us toward becoming more of who we a re.

Or they can remain meaningless. The Coatlicue state can be a way station or it can be a way of life. The Coatlicue State Coatlicue da luz a todo y a todo devora. Ella es el monstruo que se trag6 todos los seres vivientes y los astros, es el monstruo que se traga al sol cada tarde y le da luz cade maiiana.

Coatlicue is a rupture in our everyday world. As the Earth, she opens a nd swallows us, plunging us into the underworld where the soul resides, allowing us to dwell in darkness. Coatlicue5 is one of the powerful images, or "archetypes," 6 that inhabits, or passes through, my psyche. She has no head. I n its place two spurts of blood gush up, transfiguring into enormous twin rattlesnakes facing each other, which symbolize the earth-bound character of human life.

She has no hands. Hanging from her neck is a necklace of open hands alternating with human hearts. The hands symboli ze the act of giving l ife ; the hearts, the pain of Mother Earth giving birth to all her children, as well as the pain that humans suffer throughout life i n their hard struggle for existence. The hearts also represen t the taking of life through sacrifice to the gods i n excha nge for their preservation of the world. In the center of the collar hangs a human skull with living eyes in its sockets.

Another identical skull is attached to her belt. These symbolize life and death together as parts of one process. Coatlicue depicts the contradictory. I n her figure, all the symbols i mportant to the religion a nd philosophy of the Aztecs are i n tegra ted. Like Medusa, the Gorgon, she is a symbol of the fus ion of opposites : the eagle a nd the serpent, heaven a nd the u nderworld, life a nd death, mobility and immobility, beauty and horror.

We are not living up to our potentialities a nd thereby i mpedi ng the evolution of the soul-or worse, Coatlicue, the Earth, opens a nd plunges us i nto its maw, devours us. By keeping the conscious mind occupied or i mmobile, the germination work takes p lace in the deep, dark earth of the unconscious. Frozen i n stasis, s he perceives a slight movement-a thousand slithering serpent hairs, Coatlicue.

It is activity not i mmobility at its most dynamic stage, but it i s a n underground movement requiring all her energy. I t brooks no i nterference from the conscious mind. I don't want to know, I don't want to be seen.

My resistance, my refusal to know some truth about myself bri ngs on that paralysis, depression-brings on the Coatlicue state. At fi rst I feel exposed and opened to the depth of my dissatisfaction. Then I feel myself closing, hidi ng, holding myself together rather than allowing myself to fall apart. Sweating, with a headache, unwilling to communicate, frightened by sudden noises, estoy asustada. In the Mexican culture it is called susto, the soul frightened out of the body. The afflicted one is allowed to rest and recuperate, to withdraw into the "underworld" without drawing condemnation.

I descend into miktlan, the underworld. In the "place of the dead" I wallow, sinking deeper and deeper. But I dig in my heels and resist. I don't want to see what's beh i nd Coatlicue's eyes, her hollow sockets.

I ca n't confront her face to face ; I must take small sips of her face through the corners of my eyes, chip away at the ice a sliver at a time. Behind the ice mask I see my own eyes. They will not look at me. Miro que estoy encabronada, miro la resistencia -resistance to knowing, to letting go, to that deep ocean where once I dived into death.

I am afraid of drowning. Resistance to sex, intima te touching, opening myself to the alien other where I am out of control, not on patrol. Every increment of conscious ness, every step forward is a travesia, a crossing. I am again an alien in new territory. And again, and again. But if I escape conscious awareness, escape "knowing," I won't be rpovi ng.

Knowledge makes me more aware, it makes me more conscious. I am no longer the same person I was before. Now she beats herself over the head for her "inactivity," a stage that is as necessary as breathing.

But that means bei ng Mexican. All her life she's been told that Mexicans are lazy. She has had to work twice as hard as others to meet the standards of the dominant culture which have, in part, become her standards.

Why does she have to go and try to make "sense" of it all? Every t i me she makes "sense" of someth ing, she has to "cross over," kicking a hole out of the old boundaries of the self and slipping u nder or over, dragging the old skin along, stumbling over i t. I t hampers her movemen t i n the new territory, dragging the ghost of the past with her. It is a dry birth, a breech birth, a screaming birth, one that fights her every inch of the way. I t is only when s he is on the other side and the shell cracks open and the lid from her eyes lifts that she sees things in a different perspective.

It is only then that s he makes the connections, formulates the insights. It is only then that her consciousness expands a tiny notch, another rattle appears on the rattlesnake tail and the added growth slightly alters the sounds she makes. Suddenly the repressed energy rises, makes decisions, connects with conscious energy and a new life begins.

It is her reluctance to cross over, to make a hole in the fence and walk across, to cross the river, to take that flying leap into the dark, that drives her to escape, that forces her i nto the fecund cave of her imagination where s he is cradled i n the arms of Coatlicue, who will never let her go.

If s he doesn't change her ways , she will remain a stone forever. No hay mas que cambiar. The one who watches, Darkness, my night. Though darkness was "present" before the world a nd all things were created, it is equated with matter, the maternal, the germinal, the potential.

I n a ttending to this first dark ness I am led back to the mystery of the Origin. The one who watches, the one who whispers in a slither of serpents. Something is trying to tell me. But I know what I want and I stamp ahead, arrogance edging my face. I tremble before the animal, the alien, the sub- or suprahuman, the me that has something in common with the wind and the trees and the rocks, that possesses a demon determination and ruthlessness beyond the human.

Los dos arbitran por el cuadro de vidrio de la ventana. I can sense the premonition of cold in the way the wind stirs the leaves in the trees, in the gray slate square of sky that frames my window. Winter's coming. I sit between warmth a nd cold never knowing which is my territory, domesticated as I am by human warmth and the peck peck of my keyboard.

Having lived my whole life i n an ignorant shadow, under the sight of hunger shuffling its little child feet, whimpering, lost. Pain is the way of life. Now I sense a warm breath on my face, see the shadow of a giant bird, her huge wings folding over me. I spent the first half of my life learning to rule myself, to grow a will, and now at midlife I fi nd that autonomy is a boulder on my path that I keep crashing i nto. I can't seem to stay out of my own way.

I've always been aware that there is a greater power than the conscious I. When to bow down to Her a nd when to allow the limited conscious mind to take over-that is the problem. For a few minutes, A ntigua, mi Diosa, I'm going to give up my control to you.

I'm going to pull it out. I plunge my hands into my solar plexus, pull. Out comes the handle with a dial face, dripping blood, unblinking eyes, watching. Eagle eyes, my mother calls me. Looking, always looking, only I don't have enough eyes. My sight is limited. You hold it for a while. Promise to give it back. Please, A ntigua. The alarm will go off if you' re i n danger. I imagine its shrill peel when danger walks a round the corner, the insulati ng walls coming down around me. Suddenly, I feel like I have a nother set of teeth in my mouth.

A tremor goes through my body from my buttocks to the roof of my mouth. On my palate I feel a tingling ticklish sensation, then something seems to be falling on me, over me, a curtai n of rai n or light. Shock pulls my breath out of me. The sphincter muscle tugs itself up, up, and the heart in my cunt starts to beat. A light is all a round me-so i n tense it could be white or black or at that j u ncture where extremes turn i nto their opposites. It passes through my body and comes out of the other side.

I collapse i nto myself-a delicious caving into myself-implodi ng, the walls l ike matchsticks softly folding inward in slow motion. I see oposici6n e insurrecci6n. I see the crack growi ng on the rock. I see the fine frenzy building. I see the heat of a nger or rebellion or hope split open that rock, releasing la Coatlicue. And someone in me takes matters into our own hands, and eventually, takes dominion over serpents-over my own body, my sexual activity, my soul, my mind, my weak nesses and strengths.

Not the heterosexual white man's or the colored man's or the s tate's or the culture's or the religion's or the parents'-just ours, mine. A nd suddenly I feel everything rus h i ng to a cen ter, a nucleus. All the lost pieces of myself come flying from the deserts a nd the mountains and the valleys, magnetized toward that center. Someth i ng pulsates in my body, a luminous thin thing that grows thicker every day. I ts presence never leaves me.

I am never alone. That w h ich abides: my vigilance, my thousand s leepless serpent eyes blinking in the night, forever open. A nd I am not afraid. Silver bits plop and ti nkle into the basin. My mouth is a motherlode. The dentist is cleaning out my roots. I get a wh iff of the stench when I gasp. My tongue keeps pushing out the wads of cotton, pushing back the drills, the long thin needles. And I think, how do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you bridle and saddle it?

How do you make it lie dow n? I remember bei ng sent to the corner of the classroom for "talking back" to the Anglo teacher when all I was trying to do was tell her how to pro nounce my name. If you want to be American, speak 'American. Pa ' hallar buen trabajo tienes que saber hablar el ingles bien.

Their purpose: to get rid of our accents. Attacks on one's form of expression with the intent to censor are a violation of the First Amendment. El A nglo con cara de inocente nos arranc6 la lengua. Wild tongues ca n't be tamed, they can only be cut out. Overcoming the Tradition of Silence A hogadas, escupimos el oscuro. Peleando con nuestra propia sombra el silencio nos sepulta. En boca cerrada no entran moscas.

Ser habladora was to be a gossip and a liar, to talk too much. I remember one of the sins I'd recite to the priest in the confession box the few times I went to confessio n : talking back to my mother, hablar pa ' 'tras, repelar. Hocicona, repelona, chismosa , having a big mouth, questioning, carrying tales are all signs of being ma!

In my culture they a re all words that a re derogatory if applied to women-I've never heard them applied to men. The first time I heard two women, a Puerto Rican and a Cuban, say the word "nosotras, " I was shocked. I had not known the word existed. Chicanas use nosotros whether we' re male or female.

We are robbed of our female being by the masculine plural. Language is a male discourse. And our tongues have become dry the wilderness has dried out our tongues and we have forgotten speech. Chicano Spanish is considered by the purist and by most Latinos deficient, a mutilation of Spanish. But Chicano Spanish is a border tongue which developed naturally. Un lenguaje que corresponde a un modo de vivir. Chicano Spanish is not incorrect, i t is a living language.

For a people who are neither Spanish nor l ive in a country in which Spanish i s the first language ; for a people who live in a country i n which English is the reigning tongue but who are not Anglo; for a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard formal, Castillian Spa nish nor standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language?

A language which they can connect their identity to, one capable of communicating the realities and values true to themselves-a language with terms that are neither espafiol ni ingles , but both.

We speak a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages. We needed a language with which we could communicate with ourselves, a secret language. For some of us, language is a homeland closer than the Southwest-for many Chicanos today live in the Midwest and the East. And because we are a complex, heterogeneous people, we speak many languages.

Some of the languages we speak are : 1. Standard English 2. Worki ng class and slang English 3. Standard Spanish 4. Standard Mexican Spanish 5. North Mexican Spanish dialect 6. Tex- Mex 8. They are the last five listed, with 6 and 7 being closest to my heart. From school, the media and j ob situations, I've picked up standard a nd working class English. From las recien llegados, Mexican immigrants, a nd braceros, I learned the North Mexican dialect. From my parents and Chicanos living in the Valley, I picked up Chicano Texas Spanish, and I speak it with my mom, younger brother who married a Mexican and who rarely mixes Spanish with English , aunts and older relatives.

When I first moved to San Francisco, I'd rattle off something in Spanish, uni ntentionally embarrassing them. Often i t is only with a nother Chicana tejana that I can talk freely. Words distorted by English are known as anglicisms or pochismos. I may switch back and forth from English to Spanish in the same sentence or in the same word. From kids and people my own age I picked up Pachuco.

Pachuco the language of the zoot suiters is a language of rebellion, both against Standard Spanish and Standard English.

It is a secret language. Adults of the cul ture and outsiders cannot understand it. It is made up of slang words from both English and Spanish. Ruca means girl or woman, vato means guy or dude, chafe means no, simon means yes , churro is sure, talk is periquiar, pigionear mea ns petting, que gdch o means how nerdy, ponte aguila mea ns watch out, death is called la pelona.

Through lack of practice and not having others who can speak it, I ' ve lost most of the Pachuco tongue. Chicanos from South Texas pronounce f as j as i n jue fue. Chicanos use "archaisms," words that are no longer in the Spanish language, words that h ave been evolved out. We say semos, truje, haiga, ansina , and naiden. We retain the "archaic" j, as in jalar, that derives from an earlier h , the French halar or the Germanic halon which was lost to s tandard Spanish in the 1 6th century , but which is still found in several regional dialects such as the one spoken in South Texas.

Due to geography, Chicanos from the Valley of South Texas were cut off linguistically from other Spanish speakers. We tend to use words that the Spaniards brought over from Medieval Spain. Andalucians pronounce fl like a y, and their d's tend to be absorbed by adj acent vowels: tirado becomes tirao.

They brought el lenguaje popular, dialectos y regionalismos. We also leave out the final syllable such as pa for para. The intervocalic y, the fl as in tortilla, ella, botella, gets replaced by tortia or tortiya, ea, botea.

We add a n additional syllable at the beginning o f certain words : atocar for tocar, agastar for gastar. Sometimes we' l l say lavaste las vacijas, other times lavates substituting the ates verb endings for the aste. We use a nglicisms, words borrowed from English : bola from ball, carpeta from carpet, machina de lavar instead of lavadora from washing machine.

Tex-Mex argot, created by addi ng a Spanish sound at the beginning or end of an English word such as co okiar for cook, watchar for watch, parkiar for park, a nd rapiar for rape, is the result of the pressures on Spanish speakers to adapt to English. Other Spanish-speaking groups are going th rough the same, or si milar, development in their Spanish.

Linguistic Terrorism Deslenguadas. Samas las def espaiial deficiente. We a re your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestisaje , the subject of your burla. Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified.

Racially, culturally and linguistically samas huerfanas -we speak an orphan tongue. Chicanas who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish have internalized the belief that we speak poor Spanish.

And because we i nternalize how our language has been used against us by the dominant culture, we use our language differences against each other. For the longest time I couldn't figure it out. Then it dawned on me. To be close to another Chicana is like looking into the mirror. We are afraid of what we'll see there. Low esti mation of self. In chi ldhood we are told that our la nguage is wrong. Repeated attacks on our native tongue diminish our sense of self. Chicanas feel uncomfortable talking in Spanish to Latinas, afraid of their censure.

Their language was not outlawed in their countries. They had a whole lifetime of being immersed in their native tongue; generations, centuries in which Spanish was a first language, taught in school, hea rd on radio a nd TV, and read in the newspaper.

If a person, Chicana or Latina, has a low esti mation of my native tongue, she also has a low estimation of me. Often with mexicanas y latinas we'll speak English as a neutral language. Even among Chica nas we tend to speak English at parties or conferences. Yet, at the same time, we're afraid the other will think we're agringadas because we don't speak Chicano Spanish. We oppress each other trying to out-Chicano each other, vying to be the "real" Chicanas, to speak like Chicanos.

There is no one Chicano language j ust as there is no one Chicano experience. Chicano Spanish is as diverse linguistically as it is regionally. By the end of this century, Spanish speakers will comprise the biggest minority group in the U. So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity-I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of exis t i ng.

I will have my voice : Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue-my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice.

I will overcome the tradition of silence. My fingers move sly against your palm Like women everywhere, we speak in code. I felt like we really existed as a people. In 1 97 1 , when I started teaching High School English to Chicano students, I tried to supplement the required texts with works by Chicanos, only to be reprimanded and forbidden to do so by the principal.

He claimed that I was supposed to teach "America n" and English li terature. At the risk of being fired, I swore my students to secrecy and slipped in Chicano short stories, poems, a play. In graduate school, while working toward a Ph. I remember seeing Cuando las hijos se van a nd surmising that all Mexica n movies played up the love a mother has for her children and what ungrateful sons and daughters suffer when they are not devoted to their mothers.

People who were to amount to something didn't go to Mexica n movies, or bailes or tune their radios to bolero, rancherita , and corrido music. The whole time I was growing up, there was nortefio music sometimes called North Mexican border music, or Tex-Mex music, or Chicano music, or cantina bar music.

I grew up listening to conjuntos , three- or four-piece bands made up of folk musicians playing guitar, bajo sexto , drums and button accordion, which Chicanos had borrowed from the German immigrants who had come to Central Texas a nd Mexico to farm and build breweries. The corridos are usually about Mexican heroes who do valiant deeds against the A nglo oppressors. P a ncho V illa's song, "La cucaracha, is the most famous one. Corridos of John F. O lder Chicanos remember Lydia Mendoza, one of the great border corrido singers who was called la Gloria de Tejas.

Her " El tango negro," sung during the Great Depression, made her a singer of the people. The everpresent corridos narrated one hundred years of border history, bringing news of events as well as entertaining. I grew up feeling ambivalent about our music. In the 50s and 60s, for the slightly educated and agringado Chicanos, there existed a sense of shame at being caught listening to our music.

Yet I couldn't stop my feet from thumping to the music, could not stop humming the words , nor hide from myself the exhilaration I felt when I heard it. For me food and certain s mells are tied to my identity, to my homeland. Woodsmoke curling up to an immense blue sky; woods moke perfuming my grandmother's clothes, her skin. The stench of cow manu re a nd the yellow patches on the ground ; the crack of a. Homemade white cheese sizzling in a pan, melting inside a folded tortilla.

My sister H ilda's hot, spicy menudo , chile colorado making it deep red, pieces of panza a nd hominy floating on top. My brother Carita barbequingfajitas i n the backyard. Even now and 3 , miles away, I can see my mother spicing the ground beef, pork and venison with chile.

My mouth salivates at the thought of the hot steaming tamales I would be eating if I were home. Among ourselves we don' t say nosotros las americanos, o nosotros las espanoles, o nosotros las hispanos. We say nosotros las mexicanos by mexicanos we do not mean citizens of Mexico ; we do not mean a national identity, but a racial one. We distinguis h between mexicanos de! Deep i n our hearts we believe that being Mexican has nothing to do with which country one lives in. Neither eagle nor serpent, but both.

And like the ocean, neither animal respects borders. Dime con quien andas y te dire quien eres. Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are.

I sometimes will answer "soy mexicana " and at others will say "soy Chicana " o "soy tejana. It is then that we forget our predominant Indian ge nes. This voluntary yet forced alienation makes for psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity-we don't identify with the Anglo-American cultural values and we don' t totally identify with the Mexican cultural values. I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometimes I feel like one cancels out the other a nd we are zero, noth ing, no one.

A veces no soy nada ni nadie. Pero hasta cuando no lo soy, lo soy. Chicanos did not know we were a people until 1 when Ceasar Chavez and the farmworkers united and I A m Joaquin was published a nd la Raza Unida party was formed in Texas.

With that recognition, we became a distinct people. N o w t h a t w e h a d a name, some of the fragmented pieces began to fall together-who we were, what we were, how we had evolved. We began to get glimpses of what we might eventually become.