Translated Woman; Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story

Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xiv, [2], 372, [10] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Chronology. DJ is price clipped and rear flap creased. Ink notation on fep. Ruth Behar (born 1956) is a Cuban-American anthropologist and writer. Her work includes academic studies, as well as poetry, memoir, and literary fiction. As an anthropologist, she has argued for the open adoption and acknowledgment of the subjective nature of research and participant-observers. She is a recipient of the Belpr� Medal. Behar was born in Havana, Cuba in 1956 to a Jewish-Cuban family of Sephardic Turkish, and Ashkenazi Polish and Russian ancestry. She was four when her family immigrated to the US following Fidel Castro's gaining power in the revolution of 1959. More than 94% of Cuban Jews left the country at that time, together with many others of the middle and upper classes. Behar attended local schools and studied as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, receiving her B.A. in 1977. She studied cultural anthropology at Princeton University, earning her doctorate in 1983. She travels regularly to Cuba and Mexico to study aspects of culture, as well as to investigate her family's roots in Jewish Cuba. She has specialized in studying the lives of women in developing societies. Behar is a professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her literary work is featured in the Michigan State University's Michigan Writers Series. A writer of anthropology, essays, poetry and fiction, Behar focuses on issues related to women and feminism. In 1985, Behar was working in Mexico when she befriended an Indian witch working as a street peddler. Townspeople said the witch, Esperanza Hernandez, had used black magic to blind her ex-husband after he regularly beat her and then left her for his mistress. Behar's portrayal of Esperanza's story in Translated Woman suggests she alienated her own mother, inspiring Behar to portray Esperanza as a feminist heroine. Esperanza claims she found redemption in a spiritualist cult constructed around Pancho Villa. She blamed pent-up rage about her husband and life as the reason for the deaths in infancy of the first six of her 12 children. Esperanza's rage led her to beat up her husband's lover, throw her son out of the house, beat a daughter for refusing to support her, and disown another son for having an affair with an uncle's ex-mistress because she considered it to be incestuous. Behar reflects on her own life and begins to think that her Latina-gringa conflicts result from a feeling of loss after having tried to model herself according to the American Dream, thus losing some sense of her Cuban Jewish family's past in that island nation. Esperanza's odyssey examines physical borders, margins and separations. Translated Woman contributes to the feminist argument that studying women in anthropology has been undervalued due to traditional academic prejudices that view women-centered analysis as too personally biased. Derived from a Kirkus review: Drawing on taped interviews, Behar lets ``Esperanza''-a Mexican village peddler-tell her life story. The result: a sometimes fascinating, occasionally static and repetitive account, supplemented with Behar's political soul-searching but with scant direct observation by the author. Funded by a MacArthur Fellowship, Behar went to Mexico in 1988 to research Mexican Inquisition witchcraft confessions. Esperanza- -poor but economically independent of an abusive husband, and condemned by neighbors for her arrogance and maybe even for being a witch-claimed Behar and her husband as fictive kin. The Mexican began visiting the Americans (secretly and at night, to avoid the curiosity and envy of neighbors) to tell her story, to refute gossip, and to affirm herself. Esperanza breaks the stereotype of the passive, self-abnegating Mexican woman: She tells of coraje (rage) against abusive men, of her striving for self-sufficiency, and of spiritual fulfillment found not in the Catholic Church but through a gender-bending medium and the cult of Pancho Villa.