76 pages • 2 hours read
Kali Fajardo-AnstineSabrina & Corina: Stories
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Neocolonialism: Material and Psychological Violence
Neocolonialism is a set of economic, cultural, and social principles that emerges from colonialism. In America, neocolonialism is the reconfiguring of colonialism, an ideology used during the founding of the United States to subjugate and eradicate Indigenous peoples who inhabited the territories now designated as America for thousands of years. Because the material and cultural project of America is an ongoing one, and Indigenous peoples continue to survive and exist within it, neocolonialism emerged as a strategy to adapt historical colonial tactics and logics to accomplish contemporary goals.
According to Fajardo-Anstine, gentrification is one key neocolonial force, which continues to displace the lives and erase the experiences, cultures, and communities of contemporary Indigenous and Latinx neighborhoods—in favor of creating profits for both corporations and local governments. This is the same logic as historical colonialism, which sought to conquer and rob Indigenous peoples of their lands, ways of life, and culture, for the ruling, White settler class to usurp and take over the land and extract profit from it. This process necessitates the violent erasure of Indigenous peoples, in both a material and psychological sense. Many of the characters within Sabrina & Corina must directly face off with the forces of neocolonialism, as it shapes and infiltrates both their daily lives and their internal lives.
The Role of Women in Maintaining Patriarchy
In “Sabrina & Corina,” Corina’s grandmother coaches her granddaughters to always look their best, to present their best faces to the male gaze. She installs a mirror on every wall of her bathroom to enforce this idea, and thereby reminds her granddaughters to always realize that men are watching and scrutinizing them from every angle. These ideas prioritize the gaze of the men looking at them, for consumptive and objectifying purposes—rather than affirming or cultivating the power of their own self. Corina’s grandmother’s actions therefore materially extend and maintain the logics of patriarchy, as they teach her granddaughters to conceive of themselves not as whole, independent beings, but objects designed and maintained for the consumption of men. Therefore, we can clearly see that Grandma Estrella, a woman, plays a key role in enforcing this misogynistic premise.
In “Sisters,” Tina sees nothing but her own path of advancement within the class and caste system of White supremacist patriarchy. She seeks to make herself into an ideal, marriageable object within the constructs and confines of that system, and habitually ostracizes her sister, Doty, for refusing to do the same. She even goes out of her way to publicly humiliate Doty, who is heavily implied to be queer, because Doty does not neatly fit into that system. In so doing, she exposes her sister to vulnerability and violence. Tina, then, is unambiguously complicit in the production and maintenance of White supremacist patriarchy. Because she plays by its rules, she legitimizes its existence.
The Indigenous Woman’s Struggle to Survive and Assert Her Identity
Throughout Sabrina & Corina, we see female Indigenous characters who occupy social, material, and psychological realms that the mainstream has no discursive way of identifying or understanding. In ways both subtle and overt, these women are marginalized in their own lives. Ana, for example, occupies a complex position as a Indigenous woman whose personal ancestral history is fractured and obscured due to the violent legacy of colonialism. The structure of the university discursively renders her existence as a primitive relic of the past, as it can only understand Indigenous peoples in a caricaturized, scientized, and neocolonial manner.
Yet, Ana exists. She is alive and carves out a place for her existence daily. She must contend with both the subtle iterations of this marginalization—such as White people never calling her by her actual name—as well as its more obvious iterations—such as the hoops she must jump through to keep her scholarship. The stories of many of the other Indigenous female characters within this collection also showcase a similar struggle to that of Ana’s. Each of these characters meets with a complex set of norms, expectations, or limitations based on their gender, race, and class—and they struggle in nuanced and unique ways to both survive and assert their unique identities or aspirations for fulfillment.
