Politics of the Body in Moraga’s Heroes and Saints

The play, Heroes and Saints, by Cherrie Moraga, deals with certain modes of
conflict in a recursive literary style. The conflicts observed in Heroes and Saint that I
chose to examine in this essay, pertain to socio-political responsibility and adversity, the
congruous relationship between the binaries of death and life and the re-creation of
psychosexual identity. The play, in its subtle and recursive method, achieves a height of
clarity in its stylistic tone that exemplifies the argumentative logic of its poet, Cherrie
Moraga. Lines like, “Inside the valley of my wound, there is a people,” envelop the moral
application of Heroes and Saints, (p. 148). In reference to the San Joaquin Valley and to
the injustices committed against the valley’s Chicano natives, the line given by the
spellbound Cerezita identifies the geography of a land and equips it with metaphorical
severity by voicing itself as a wounded body. The choice of words offered by the poet’s
elemental reclamations of identity, are formulated throughout the play’s recursive
qualities. Gender, class and political/social responsibility are issues that the poet critiques
through the dramatic personae of the characters, who ultimately, are the embodiments of
the full Chicano experience weighted by misfortune.
Beginning with a political demonstration and ending in one, the entire dramatic
composition of Heroes and Saints is a fiesta of death and life, darkness and light. The
actions of socio-political protests are lively responses to death, and this action of el
Pueblo, supports the idea of life, by giving voice to the corpses of their dead children. In
Act II, scene 3 of the play, maternal characters represented as a chorus, chant off the
name, death-date, diagnosis and age of their dead children so as to demonstrate, the living
socio-political adversities that have been weighed against them. If we take into account
what Amparo had told anchor-woman Ana Perez, in an earlier scene of the play, that “If
you put the children in the ground, the world forgets about them,” and by crucifying the
corpses of poisoned infants like Memo Delgado’s in a political demonstration, the
“enemy” who poisoned these infant bodies, may see the travesty of their crimes, (p. 94).
Though the results of this initial demonstration are not enough to stop the brutality of
crop dusting (or, discharging poison unto entire communities), police surveillance and
brutality, or well-plotted assassinations of entire generations; they are, in fact, enough
motive to rouse up further destructive impulses expressed by a policeman who beats
Amparo with a nightstick “in slow, methodical blows,” on national television, (p. 133). It
seems as though the poet is informing an audience with moral/ethical implications which
suggest that violence begets more violence and that the sentiment of vengeance should
not be the motive initiating political responsibility, retaliation or solution.
Yolanda, in Act II, in a fit of responsive rage and justified frenzy, exclaims to
Dolores, “Don’t you see, ama? I gotta find her [Evelina’s] killer…I want to kill him,
ama,” so as to justify her passions of vengeance for the loss of her poisoned daughter,
Evalina Valle, (p. 132). Dolores, who in the final scene of Act I, understands the exact
sentiment of her daughter when she expresses the same anger to a crop duster by
exclaiming, “Why don’t you just drop a bomb, cabrones! It’d be faster that way!” (p.
126). These rich and violent passions are a reaction to the historical violence and
aggression that is waged on Chicanos in the United States. They are emotive responses
that are natural, organic and base yet, there is no methodical, strategic or systematic logic
to them when they stand in isolation. It is through the cerebral refinement of Cerezita and
Juan, i.e., the well read characters who understand the power of language, “Of ecstatic
speech,” and of “The gift of tongues,” that bring methodized craftiness and artfulness to
the emotive reactions that are responsive to the violence and brutality waged onto them,
(p. 108). It is also through Amparo’s speeches that people are mobilized, and moreover, it
is through the composition of dramatic action offered by Cherrie Morraga’s play, that
ultimately exhibits a concise method by which emotions can be organically expressed in
the containment of logical and political discourse.
Earlier I mentioned that the play draws onto allusions such as death and life -in a
broad sense- that contain rich elements of phenomena in the natural order of things.
Burials, slash-and-burning techniques for crop regeneration, disease, fiesta, the
unification of sexual bodies, miracles, medicine, crucifixions, weeping and inebriation
are all elemental components of ritualized festivities of both life and death, and are
displayed in the actions of the play so that a spiritual transmutation (or catharsis) is the
result of the dance between poet, actor and audience. The construction of Evalina’s tomb
by Bonnie, the unburied corpses of infants hanging from crucifixes, the final burning of
the crop fields; bodily deformation, cancer and neuroblastoma; the fiesta for Mario and
Don Gilberto’s intoxication, the sexual unification of Juan’s and Cerezita’s virgin bodies,
Cerezita’s miraculous physical resilience; the homeopathic properties of marigolds and
the transformative elements of character; all of these are suggestive and allusive to the
congruous relationship between life and death. A clear exemplification of this link
between life and death, is when Mario complains about the cold water that is going to
“freeze off” his skin “sooner than any chemical” pesticides would, (p. 95). Later in scene
3 of Act I, the water -that is donated by The Arrowhead- is distributed to Dolores’ family
by Amparo, because the government issued tap water “is an orange-yellow color,” and is
what also poisons the children and the sheep that Cerezita observes from out of her
window while she weeps and undergoes the pensiveness of her life’s self-actualization,
(p. 98-99). This bond between life and death is nowhere more clear than in the
transfigured Cerezita’s final monologue where she speaks of the land and her people as
one body. Red, the color of passions, is the color of the setting sun, of blood and fruit; it
is a color that Chicanos remember “in order to understand why their fields, like the rags
of the wounded, have soaked up the color and bear no fruit,” thus it is a color
symbolizing both the fertility and infertility of the land and its people, (p. 148).
The play also addresses the issue of gender identity within the ideological
complex of Chicano culture. Ideas such as traditional machismo, femininity, sexuality
and a non-traditional re-creation of new-found sexual identities, find underlying current
throughout the play’s conceptual dynamics. Psychosexual liberation from westernized
patriarchal standards is best represented in Cerezita’s infantile refusal to suckle on the
breasts of a fearful nurse. In scene 3 of Act I, Cerezita re-creates her feminine sexual
identity when she “refused to nurse from,” a woman whose breasts tasted of fear which
“was very bitter,” (p. 95). It was here where Cerezita reclaims her feminine independence
from both an oppressed and oppressive other. Dolores supports this evidence when she
tells her that “All of a sudden, you dint wan’ the chichi no more,” and despairs at the fact
that her daughter had consciously made the effort to defy conventional standards of
feminine codependency, (p. 128). Another example of this feminine liberation could be
observed when Cerezita sublimates her body’s psychosexual force, i.e., the tongue that is
her body’s “most faithful organ,” which enables her to perform the actions which other
characters are unable to perform, (p. 106). Moreover, Moraga’s highest form of sexual re-
creation is demonstrated in scene 8 of Act II, when Juan and Cerezita engage in an act of
purely erotic love where Moraga directs the pure-hearted priest to “come to orgasm,”
while caressing and kissing the face of Cerezita, (p. 140). This exchange is the direct
exemplification of Moraga’s ideological anti-transcendence within the content of the
grotesque theatre.
In scene 12 of Act I, Moraga offers a vivid critique of machismo that is prevalent
in Chicano culture. In this scene, the 3 male figures of the play, Juan, Don Gilberto and
Mario display 3 different types of masculine identity, i.e., conventional masculinity: Don
Gilberto; unconventional homoerotic masculinity: Mario; and the medium between the
two identities: Juan. “The only men we got at this table,” says Don Gilberto, “are
hombres de carne y hueso,” (p. 121). It is in this line where Moraga delineates the type of
criticism she is about to execute. In Don Gilberto’s logic, a man is gendered a man when
he isn’t “afraid to lift a sack of potatoes, to defend our children [and] to put our arms
around la waifa at night,” (p. 121). Whereas the logic of Juan’s conception of a gendered
man is a self-conscious decision, as he embarrassingly states his case by admitting that a
man, “just make[s] choices…I guess,” when pertaining to his sexual identification, (p.
121). He further explains his logic in scene 10 of Act I, when he tells Cerezita that it was
the garments of the priest that subjectively “drew [him] to be a ‘man of the cloth,’” and
the “vestments, the priest’s body asleep underneath that cloth [and] the heavy weight of it
tranquilizing him,” are what consciously lured him to become a man who has “given up
volition in that sense,” (p. 115). On the other hand, Mario’s conception of masculinity is
voiced by Dolores when she asks him, “Why you wannu make yourself como una
mujer?” and he contests, “It’s no secret, ama. You’re the only one that doesn’t want to
see it,” i.e., his homosexual identification, (p. 123). When these 3 projections of
masculine identity are synthesized, moreover, when they are each taken in their proper
gradation, I believe Moraga is aiming to re-create the notion of psychosexual
identification for the Chicano male as a sensitively conscious and fearless man that is
able to work and love in a healthy state for other men and women in his communal life.
Overall, Heroes and Saints is a play that pushes literary tropes beyond its limit. It
is a politics of the body just as it is a body of politics. The issues imbedded in the drama
are deeply human. They reach the core within any diaspora community. Cherrie
Moraga’s elemental structure of plot is vitally spiritual and the irony of this is that each
character undergoes spiritual refutation and transfiguration. When reading this play, I was
moved to a state of pathos and pushed to a depth of my own compassion partly because
of my identification with the play’s diction, and partly with my subjective response to the
play’s cultural familiarity. Heroes and Saints is, no doubt, a play that could be visited and
revisited without loosing the poetic flare of its fundamental richness. Moraga’s work
deals with re-creation of character in both the particular and the universal sense: in the
fictional and the non-fictional.

Isac Rafael Galvan, 2009