meant to be a universal statement about all Chicana
women.
Pat Mora, a prolific writer particularly in
the last decades of the twentieth century, is also
a media personality. She is an ardent advocate
for children’s literacy, having started the presti-
gious Estela and Rau ́l Mora Award to promote
reading awareness. In her poetry, Mora often is
seen as standing for social issues, particularly
feminism and Mexican-American identity.
Mora identifies herself as Hispanic and fem-
inist. In interviews, she has explained her disap-
pointment when, as a beginning writer and
teacher, she looked for books containing works
by Mexican-American women, only to find that
very few existed. Keeping in mind the fact that
Mora consciously tries to fill a void, to include
images of Hispanic women in her works, can
help readers understand her poetry. Unfortu-
nately, it can also throw a reader off track. As
is often the case, applying generalizations to a
specific can lead readers to see what they expect
to find, whether it is actually there or not.
For example, Mora’s poem ‘‘Uncoiling’’
describes nature at during a violent storm. The
poem does convey inferences about the ways
women are viewed and the ways they view them-
selves. It even contains a glancing reference to
Mexican-American identity. It seems to, at least.
Often, a poem will yield greater understanding
for readers who have the tenacity to look for
meaning under the surface, but in the case of
‘‘Uncoiling,’’ it would be very easy to go too far
with a close reading, to miss the author’s intent.
That, of course, requires an understanding of the
author’s intent, and such a thing is never clear—
no one can really say what a poem means, and
frequently a poet will deny that she was con-
scious of a specific intent. There are clues within
the poem, though, that can be used to define its
focus and purpose.WHAT
DO I READ
NEXT? The poems in Mora’s first collectionChants
(1984) concern identity and in particular her
feeling of being viewed as a foreigner
because of her Mexican background.
In Julie Williams’sEscaping Tornado Season:
A Story in Poems, the protagonist tries to
cope with the death of her father and life
with her emotionally distant mother. This
book for young adults was published by Har-
perTeen in 2004.
The Mexican Americanpoet Sandra Cisneros
is considered a little more strident than Mora,
particularly the poems inCisneros’s collection
Loose Woman: Poems. The title poem, ‘‘Loose
Women,’’ comes close to the turbulent fury
that Mora describes in ‘‘Uncoiling.’’ Cisneros’s
collection was published in 1995 by Vintage.
An interview with Mora is included in Karen
Rosa Ikas’s collectionChicana Ways: Conver-
sations with Ten Chicana Writers.Moradis-
cusses writing, culture, and teaching, along
with other subjects. Ikas’s book was published
by University of Nevada Press in 2002.
Lorna Dee Cervantes is credited with being
one of the first Chicana poets to establish a
national reputation in the early 1980s, when
Mora was just beginning to write. The
poetry in her second book,From the Cables
of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger,
which was published in 1991 by Arte Pub-
lico, is widely respected. The journey of a young Mexican mother
who leaves her child behind to find a new
life in Texas is described in the novelGolon-
drina, Why Did You Leave Me?by Ba ́rbara
Renaud Gonza ́lez. This book, part of the
University of Texas Press Chicana Matters
series, was published in 2009.
Pat Mora discusses her life and writing with
the voices of her ancestors in her memoir,
House of Houses (Camino del Sol), published
by University of Arizona Press in 2008.
THE TORNADO IS DEPICTED AS A WOMAN
UNLEASHING HER POWER, UNLOADING HER ENERGY,
PLAYING OUT HER FORCE. IN THIS HUMAN PROCESS,
IT BECOMES SYMPATHETIC.’’Uncoiling