The theater of life is massive, with plenty of seating for locals and those from afar. People from all walks of life trickle in, scurrying to find their seats, for the show promises to be captivating. As with any other great drama, the play will not disappoint in entertaining the crowd but will also educate with a message of diversity, equality, and respect. We must not forget respect. Estela Portillo-Trambley’s life was very much a drama from which we can all benefit.
Portillo-Trambley, a feminist author of plays, books, poems, and essays, was born January 16, 1926, in El Paso, Texas. Her parents, Francisco Portillo, a mechanic, and Delphina Fierro Portillo, a piano teacher, had four children, Portillo-Trambley being the oldest. Portillo-Trambley spent much of her childhood in the care of her grandparents, Julian and Luz Fierro, who owned a convenience store in El Segundo Barrio. During her formative years, having attended El Paso High School, Portillo-Trambley developed an intense fascination with literature, becoming an avid reader, reading English and American classics, poetry, and philosophy.
The Texas State Historical Association Handbook of Texas notes that Portillo-Trambley kept a “positive attitude regarding the poverty that she witnessed as a child,” Portillo-Trambley stating that “la pobreza nunca derriba el espíritu” (poverty never defeats the spirit). It was then that her fervor for literature kindled. At 17, she married Robert Trambley, an Anglo salesman, and together they had six children, five girls and one boy, quite the handful for any young mother. In “A Melus Interview: Estela Portillo Trambley” with Faye Nell Vowell in 1982, Portillo-Trambley states she married young and lived the life of a woman she was taught and raised to be, based on old social orders, being a mother and wife and a woman who stays home and nurtures her family. Her interest in literature led her to graduate in 1956 with a B.A. in English from Texas Western College. She then became a high school English teacher at the El Paso Technical Institute, now defunct, from 1957 to 1964 and served as the English department chair for six years. In 1977 PortilloTrambley received her M.A. in English Literature from the University of Texas at El Paso.
Image caption: Estella Portillo-Trambley. courtesy of El Paso, Inc.
It could only have been a beautiful day in El Paso when Portillo-Trambley sat in a theater among colleagues desperately seeking material for a play. She had left teaching for a life of writing. Unbeknownst to her, this day would be a pivotal moment in her life. Her true calling was about to be ignited, and what ensued was influential works of literature. “What we need is material, material!” Portillo-Trambley’s colleagues cried, to which she responded, “I’ll write you-all a play.”
By this point, Portillo-Trambley was nearing her forties. She had lived a life filled with wonderful experiences and times of great sorrow. Her son, Robert Keith Trambley, died after only one year of life from an adrenal gland infection, a devastating loss to any parent. The Handbook of Texas notes that “her ensuing pain and numbness eventually compelled her to write.” Portillo-Trambley later comments, “I remember saying to myself in the months that passed, ‘I must take hold of what I have learned and apply it to what I know. I must write.’” She says that although his death was tragic, she would not fade away and let the dark emotions consume her; she vowed to keep living life to its fullest for the lives of the beautiful family she still had. Her first work after her son’s death was a book of poetry, Impressions of a Chicana.
Portillo-Trambley immersed herself in the Chicano culture, loving how the Chicano people truly cherish the little things in life, such as family, spending time together, cooking and teaching children. “Poverty does have a certain element of teaching people. Wisdom must have a certain amount of suffering. And I think that poverty has done this to many Chicano people, giving them acceptance, an appreciation that the affluent people would not really have,” says Portillo-Trambley in the Vowell interview. However, as beautiful as this culture is, sprinkled within it were harsh circumstances, such as homophobia and the machismo way of life, the aggressive masculine pride that dwelled within it.
Exploring sexuality was considered strange and ungodly. Catholicism, in particular, was vital to the Chicano communities, but biblical tradition viewed homosexuality as a sin, so Chicanos maintained zero tolerance for any sign of it. The Bible also characterizes women as submissive and obedient; they are to maintain a life of servitude, serving not only God but their male counterparts, living in a patriarchal world. When asked how her writing differs from traditional Chicanos, she responds that women are grouped into three categories: the mother, the wife, and the sexual partner. “I have always fought these images,” remarks Portillo-Trambley in the Vowell interview. “We should be seen as a totality of all things, and we cannot be labeled as one or the other. We cannot be fit into a pattern.”
Portillo-Trambley lived during the Feminist Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, commonly known as the “second wave” of feminism. Women protested for equal pay, ending the normalcy of domestic violence and sexual harassment within their workplaces. Even though this was an impactful movement, it was aimed solely toward white women. The women who participated in these protests neglected to bring attention to the numerous racial issues that non-white women faced. As a result, there were multiple movements created for the different cultural groups, one of them Chicana women. PortilloTrambley’s writings helped raise much-needed awareness for the women of her culture, an understanding that hopefully would lead to liberation.
Portillo-Trambley commonly wrote about women rebelling against what societal laws had Chicano women do or the image that men gave them, comments Carmen Par in her article “Of Dwelling Places” from the book Surrealism in the Work of Estela Portillo. In “If It Weren’t for the Honeysuckle,” Portillo-Trambley writes how the image of a woman is said to be a man’s possession, enslaved or walloped effigies to burn upon the altars of men. Female characters in works like The Day of the Swallows and “The Trees” rebel against the traditional roles assigned to women in the society in which they live. These women die in the story of their need for power and change; however, their deaths represent a form of freedom and pride, to have been able to express themselves without any shame or fear.
Portillo-Trambley believed the theater should unify people, making them aware of America’s injustices. In Varieties of Ethnic Criticism, Nell Fay Vowell writes that Portillo-Trambley separates her portrayal of female characters from the image male writers give women in their plays or novels. Traditions, customs and expectations do not hold down her characters. They create their world where they overcome the dominance of patriarchal societies. Portillo-Trambley believed everyone should have the opportunity to be their best without limits or fear of old traditions or societal expectations. This is how she expresses herself through her female characters. She hoped to make a difference and change people’s image of women through theater, where there is that sense of immediacy and urgency.
Her most famous work and first play, in 1971, is Day of Swallows, a modern-day tragedy centering on feminism and lesbianism intertwined with religion and even suicide. The critically acclaimed play follows the story of Josefa, who is, unbeknownst to everyone around her, a lesbian. She owns a parlor in her town, and, like an Aristotelian model, the The Rain of Estela Portillo-Trambley By Sarah Turner continued on page 21 Estela Portillo-Trambley 21 entire play takes place inside this parlor. Josefa’s homosexuality is a symbol of rebellion against the patriarchy. In Josefa’s hometown, it is a tradition for virgins to wash their hair in the local lake to find a man to marry. At the story’s beginning, Josefa rescues a girl, Alyesa, from a form of sex trafficking. Alyesa moves in with Josefa, and the two women become attracted. One day while making love, Josefa and Alyesa are caught by a man named David, who also lives in the parlor. Josefa cuts out David’s tongue while the frightened Alyesa holds him down, seemingly taking away his power over her, representing what Portillo-Trambley saw as the silencing of women in the Chicano culture.
However, even with such an extreme act, Josefa does not develop a voice of her own. The act, in a way, only oppresses her further. She is still terrified to let the town know who she is. Alyesa, traumatized by this experience, no longer feels a connection with Josefa. Alyesa later leaves the parlor and Josefa after falling in love with Eduardo, one of the men who lives in their town and represents a lustful machismo stereotype.
Another character, Clara, is a troubled woman, unhappy in her marriage. She refuses to leave because her culture brainwashes her. Her husband, Don Esquinas, believes in the traditional roles of women. He wants Clara to have his children and be his obedient homemaker while he has affairs with other women. In retaliation, Clara briefly encounters Eduardo and falls very much in love with him but knows he is marrying Alyesa. Clara later discovers she cannot bear children and suffers a mental breakdown. Having already committed infidelity multiple times, her husband furthers his cruelty and places Clara in a sanitarium, again, symbolizing men’s control over women. It also illustrates that men did not view love in the same light women did.
To men like Don Esquinas, women are only as valuable as their ability to have children, cook and clean. To men like David, Clara is only meaningful for her body. To women like Clara, love means validation; as long as men accept them and want them, they are worthy of love. When Clara loses that assurance, she loses herself.
Josefa symbolizes rebellion against disruptive ideas of love. She wants to love someone in the truest sense, not for validation or control, but for a sense of completeness, laughter, attraction and commitment. For Josefa, this is forbidden love because of her attraction to women. In the end, Josefa admits to the priest, Father Prado, that she is lesbian and later tragically commits suicide by drowning herself, ironically, in the lake where the virgins wash their hair.
The imagery grasps audiences’ emotions and makes them feel the awful effects these oppressions can have on their victims. Not letting specific groups of people live openly and freely, forcing them to live according to the standards any given culture or society may impose on them, can only lead to immensely negative consequences, depression and anxiety. Portillo-Trambley hopes that Josefa’s spirit reaches women and instills in them a new meaning of life, not to subject themselves to what is expected of them but to find self-love and release their fears of showing who they are.
Portillo-Trambley also wrote novels and short stories, entertaining themes of nature. She felt that men’s treatment of women was contrary to what nature intended. Women often symbolized Mother Nature, showing their gentle, caring, free souls on earth. Patriarchy symbolized organized chaos, oppressive in the end. Everything and everyone had a gender role to play. To Portillo-Trambley, nature represented a beauty that could grow in any direction.
Portillo-Trambley’s novel Trini, a coming-of-age story, and many other of her writings reflect dominant issues among gender roles, sexuality, indigenous culture and immigration. Trini begins with Trini as a young girl; her life is one of innocence and purity. Beauty surrounds her village; plants grow freely in any direction they please. As A. O. Eysturoy’s article “Trini: A Chicana Quest Myth” states, Portillo-Trambley includes a description of how Trini sees herself in a portrait: “The most amazing thing in the painting were the feet, bare, brown, seeming to grow out of the earth itself.” When Trini’s mother passes away, Trini loses the role model who intends to show her what it means to be a woman. Instead, Trini is left to find her meaning. Trini’s village becomes an attraction where people come in search of gold, turning the blissful, natural environment into a place of meaningless economic interest. This new environment becomes a place where the trees now grow uniformly, no longer free to grow in a natural direction.
Trini leaves her village, looking for guidance and direction in life. She finds Catholicism and learns she will lose her virginity when a man decides to take it from her and not when she naturally feels ready. Trini loses her childhood freedom and innocence and grows into a woman who believes in the traditional role of servitude within a patriarchal community. Later in the novel, Trini moves to Chihuahua, where women only seem to have two functions, that of wife or mistress.
Portillo-Trambley’s Trini directly mirrors the experiences of the Chicana culture. Chicanas were stuck in a world of male dependence and lacked a voice and educational opportunities. As a result of this male dominance, women were not taken seriously. Portillo-Trambley relays to her readers that change is greatly needed. Trini wants badly to be independent, but in the end, she marries a man who cheats on her, forcing her to stay with him because she has no other means of survival.
Portillo-Trambley’s novella and collection of short stories, Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings, won the Premio Quinto Sol award in 1975, the first award of its kind awarded to a woman. Incidentally, she was the first Chicana to publish a short story collection and the first to write a musical comedy. Her play, Blacklight, earned second place at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Hispanic Playwriting Competition in 1985. Although PortilloTrambley had won these awards, she still did not consider her writing good enough. She continually searched for ways to improve. “Writing is still my journey of self-discovery,” she is quoted in the K. R. Ikas book Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers. Portillo-Trambley rewrote all the stories in the original Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings, removing a few and replacing them with new ones. She felt her writing in these short stories was too pontifical. She is not suggesting women are a superior force who are too good for the world. Quite the opposite, she wanted her writing to convey that women deserve to be treated as a necessity.
Portillo-Trambley’s accomplishments did not end with writing. She helped found the first bilingual theater, Los Pobres Bilingual Theater. As the resident dramatist, she taught drama at El Paso Community College and was a homebound teacher for the El Paso Public Schools. In 1972, she transferred to mass communications and had a talk show on radio KIZZ in El Paso, a politically oriented program. She also hosted KROD-TV El Paso, a television show on the arts and culture. In the 1980s, she directed and starred in the local El Paso community theater. PortilloTrambley wrote pieces on Hispanic history and culture for NPR Radio. In 1995, she was the Presidential Chair in Creative Writing at the University of California, Davis. Her plays have been performed at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Riverside.
Her works are full of genius emotion and symbolism that leave audiences full of sadness and anger. The Handbook of Texas states that “scholars have heralded Trambley as a pioneer writer in the field of Chicana feminism, and her works portray strong young women characters that question their traditional and subordinate roles in society.” Trambley wanted readers to feel her message; she wanted nothing more than connectedness among people and an awareness of the inherent problems the Chicano culture faced and still does today. She witnessed Chicanas becoming fascinated with these ideas of tradition, where women were portrayed as picture-perfect ideas of obedience, a mold Trambley worked hard to destroy.
Estella Portillo-Trambley passed away on December 29, 1998, leaving behind lessons of equality and respect. A memorial is dedicated to her in El Paso at the Chamizal Theater, featuring four of her plays, Blacklight, Morality Play, Sun Images, and Isabel and the Dancing Bear. She made an impact with her writing, a true heroine. Her legacy will continue to impact readers for as long as her stories are read and kept alive. The show is over, but the message lives on. While some caught on to it quickly, others leave the theater in disagreement. That is okay. There will be more shows, for the massive theater of life welcomes all, and maybe one day it will be filled beyond capacity, where everyone enjoys the right to a free and open life. Estela Portillo-Trambley invites you in.
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