Gulf Gothic: Mexico, the U.S. South and La Llorona's Undead Voices by Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Gulf Gothic: Mexico, the U.S. South and La Llorona’s Undead Voices by Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright
• Alexander Lalama

Flores-Silva, Dolores, and Keith Cartwright. 2022. Gulf Gothic: Mexico, the U.S. South and La Llorona’s Undead Voices. New York: Anthem Press. $24.95 sc. 90 pp.

Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright’s Gulf Gothic: Mexico, the U.S. South and La Llorona’s Undead Voices adds a critical layer to the growing field of Gothic studies, and in particular contributes another voice to the growing questioning of how we define the gothic in terms of national and colonial literatures. Commonly viewed as beginning in eighteenth century Britain with the publishing of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto in 1764, gothic literature is associated with a constellation of tropes, anxieties, and themes. Flores-Silva and Cartwright build on the decolonizing trajectory that has erupted in the past decade in regards to gothic literary studies, alongside recent work by Maisha Wester, Leila Taylor, and Xavier Aldana-Reyes. Gulf Gothic argues the Gulf of Mexico—specifically the Mexican and US gulf coast region—has always been a gothic realm, one whose gothic nature is exacerbated by the legacies of colonization, plantation slavery, as well as capitalist extractivism, not to mention the environmental catastrophes that reveal the underlying social and racial hierarchies that often remain submerged in dominant narratives of the region. Even more critical, though, is Flores-Silva and Cartwright’s excavation of the gothic that existed in the Gulf long before the arrival of Columbus and Cortés, far earlier than Walpole’s novel, what they call a “Gulf gothic performance” (2022, 7). [End Page 134]

La Llorona becomes the central image and figure of the Gulf gothic, a figure, folktale, and monstrous specter that represents the transnational nature of the Gulf gothic. Flores-Silva and Cartwright call into question the dominant narrative of La Llorona as beginning with Doña Maria, also known as Malinche, the Indigenous woman who served as Hernan Cortés’s translator and lover during the Spanish arrival, the often-repudiated and misogynistic image of Mexico’s conquest. As a cautionary tale of the deceitfulness and duplicitous ways of the wronged woman, Gulf Gothic locates images and narratives of other La Llorona-like figures extant in Veracruz’s Gulf shore long before the arrival of Spaniards to the region. What arises is a genealogy of La Llorona that extends back to texts like the Popol Vuh, in Aztec figures such as Tlazoltéotl, and in clay figures of women who died in childbirth (Cihuateteo) in a death shrine at the pre-colonial ruins of El Zapotal. All of these weeping-woman figures are images of seduction, of repressed truth, of women who have become couched as monstrous temptresses and sirens: all evoke the Gothic narrative associated with La Llorona long before her appearance in folklore following the Spanish conquest.

As such, La Llorona’s pre-colonial predecessors speak to a Gulf gothic figure whose Indigenous roots prefigure the postconquest use of La Llorona to speak of anxieties within colonial and post-colonial Mexico regarding the nation’s Indigenous past, where the cultural narrative of mestizaje hides the undead voices of natives. Here, Flores-Silva and Cartwright represent how contemporary Mexican Gothic iterations of La Llorona serve to recuperate the Indigenous presence in the Gulf. In the process, Gulf Gothic shows the ways earlier La Llorona figures traverse the waters of the gulf to the US gulf shore, offering a Gothic image for Chicana feminist writers like Sandra Cisneros and American Indigenous writers like Leslie Marmon Silko, a gothic figuration that materializes the spectral figure in the form of real-life women who wail against gendered structures of violence, abuses at the US-Mexico border, and the dispossession of Indigenous land as the result of settler-colonialism. Reading these through the outlined history of La Llorona opens up a line of flight from the disgraced image of La Llorona to one that cries not due to her own regret over infanticide but to reclaim and mourn the lives and spirits lost in the wake of violence.

The metaphor of the...