SOURCE: Ordóñez, Elizabeth J. “Narrative Texts by Ethnic Women: Rereading the Past, Reshaping the Future.” MELUS 9, no. 4 (winter 1982): 19-28.

In the following essay, Ordóñez analyzes how Portillo Trambley's Rain of Scorpions and works by three other female authors become “both the means and embodiment of modifying and reshaping female history, myths, and ultimately personal and collective identity.”

History and morality are written and read within the infrastructure of texts.

—“Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language

The consensus among many ethnic writers today is that the eighties will be a time to move beyond cultural nationalism, beyond dogmatism, and that readers will need to learn to read as they draw from the past to reshape the future. This essay will propose that the narrative text itself, if properly read and decoded, may indeed be a tool for accomplishing this goal, for as Borges has...