A Shadowy Sequence: Chicana Textual/Sexual Reinventions of Sor Juana

Abstract

In his CD Boxing for God (2001), Chicano performer El Vez includes cheesy but affectionate song, featuring pocho-rap interlude, about Sor Juana In?s de la Cruz (1648-95), nun who read so much and wrote so well her fame spread across de nation. El Vez's Sor Juana is a complicated lady, at once God's baby and the first feminist you, woman who gave Latinas chance to fight or dance for education too A cult figure on Elvis-impersonation circuit in U.S.A., El Vez operates as vigorous agent of popular-musical neoculturation, committed to resemanticizing classic Anglo-American pop songs into anthems of politicized Chicano consciousness, and contaminating cultural high with logics of mass-cultural and Chicano barrio consumption. As it pertains to Sor Juana, El Vez's pop agenda adds neat coda?and pays tacit homage?to now extensive body of work by Chicana writers who have similarly regarded Sor Juana as a complicated lady worthy of imaginative reworking. Poems by Pat Mora (Maybe Nun After All; The Young Sor Juana) and Lydia Camarillo (Mi reflejo), plays from Estela Portillo Trambley Juana) and Karen Zacar?as (The Sins of Sor Juana), and novel by Alicia Gaspar de Alba (Sor Juana 's Second Dream), form reconstruc? tive sequence that has remade Sor Juana into Chicana feminist icon and, in one case, Chicana feminist lesbian icon.