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• Title: Cooking up the Politics of Identity, Corporeality, And Cultura: Humor and Subversion in Denise Chavez's Loving Pedro Infante (Estudios y Confluencias)
• Author : Confluencia: Revista Hispanica de Cultura y Literatura
• Release Date : January 22, 2010
• Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,Reference,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 115 KB

Description

Chicana author Denise Chavez has produced three novels: The Last of The Menu Girls (1986), Face of an Angel (1995), and her latest work, Loving Pedro Infante (2002). Humor is a common thread throughout Chavez's, particularly the latter two books. In fact, humor plays a key role in the framework Chavez constructs in her writing to address various issues and their connection to gender. This humor is not ludic, functioning instead as a strategic subversion of dominant discourses regarding class, gender, ethnicity, body politics and identity. Tey Diana Rebolledo suggests that Chavez "uses humor in her narratives to critique contemporary life and to infuse us with an acute (and sometimes agonizing) sense of our own predicaments. She also challenges the traditional representation of women as passive, accepting, and "nice" by utilizing exaggerated descriptions of women's bodies and all the taboo subjects connected with the body and bringing them out in the open" (159). Rebolledo succinctly observes that "Humor functions as a regenerative strategy, questioning social relations and reshaping them. In both Face or an Angel and Loving Pedro Infante the humor allows the women characters to question their positions in ah unequal society and find a way to live that allows them to be themselves. It allows them to create their own voices, their own subjectivity" (173). In Loving Pedro Infante, it is humor in combination with both food as figurative language and English/Spanish that shape a framework for the subversion of politics regarding the body, culture and identity. In an interview with Juanita Heredia and Bridget Kevane, Chavez points out that "With humor, you can say some very deep things. Life has its sorrows and its tragedies, but humor is something that tempers the bitterness, the hard edges of life. You keep surviving. That's the Mexican spirit. Ni modo, you keep on going" (17). In Loving Pedro Infante, Chavez captures what she identifies as a "Mexican spirit." To precisely define the Mexican spirit is a daunting task due to the multiple layers inherent in the concept of "mexicanidad" or "Mexicaness." It is equally challenging to define the US-Mexican border in the sense of a philosophical concept or an identity. In terms of Chavez's work, she focuses primarily on identity and cultural politics and their relationship to Mexicanos and Chicanos on the US side of the border. In her book Humoring Resistance: Laughter and the Excessive Body in Latin American Women's Fiction, Dianna Nieblyski observes the following about humor in women's writing: "Sharing a commitment to the comic vision does not imply sharing an identical sense of humor. Neither does it imply sharing a common objective for the deployment in humor" (4). Nieblyski, in her analysis of several Latin American women's novels, finds that "they engage different moods of humor, revealing, in the process, diverse ways in which humor can lead to different degrees of resistance, transgression, of subversion" (4). Chavez uses language and humor, combined the rhetoric of food in order to convey a distinctive point of view on gender, identity, the body, and culture.

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