A shadowy sequence: Chicana textual/sexual reinventions of Sor Juana

In his CD Boxing for God (2001), the Chicano performer El Vez includes a cheesy but affectionate song, featuring a pocho-rap interlude, about Sor Juana In?s de la Cruz (1648-95), the nun who "read so much and wrote so well her fame spread across de nation." El Vez's Sor Juana is "a complicated lady," at once "God's baby" and "the first feminist you," the woman who "gave Latinas the chance to fight or dance for education too " A cult figure on the Elvis-impersonation circuit in the U.S.A., El Vez operates as a vigorous agent of popular-musical neoculturation, committed to resemanticizing classic Anglo-American pop songs into anthems of politicized Chicano consciousness, and contaminating the cultural "high" with the logics of mass-cultural and Chicano barrio consumption. As it pertains to Sor Juana, El Vez's pop agenda adds a neat coda?and pays a tacit homage?to the now extensive body of work by Chicana writers who have similarly regarded Sor Juana as "a complicated lady" worthy of imaginative reworking. Poems by Pat Mora ("Maybe a Nun After All"; "The Young Sor Juana") and Lydia Camarillo ("Mi reflejo"), plays from Estela Portillo Trambley ("Sor Juana") and Karen Zacar?as (The Sins of Sor Juana), and the novel by Alicia Gaspar de Alba (Sor Juana 's Second Dream), form a reconstruc? tive sequence that has remade Sor Juana into a Chicana feminist icon and, in one case, a Chicana feminist lesbian icon.