With renewed interest in the history of Mexican-American literature and the publication of all her short fiction in The Collected Stories of María Cristina Mena, her work is now receiving greater consideration.
[3] Mena reached an audience of predominantly middle- and upper-class white Americans by writing for The Century Magazine, which in quality and quantity was among the leading general monthly periodicals at the time.
The notion that Mena supported Century's perspective is refuted by the veiled social commentary of her short stories, and more explicitly, in her letters to the editors, in which she fights to include authentic elements of Mexican tradition in her work.
She wrote during a time when people were “wary of the machine age many thought the U.S. was moving into” such that “commentators increasingly focused on Indians from both sides of the border as an antidote to the soulless impulse of modernity”.
[9] Mena recalls the concept of a noble savage in describing Petra's voice “with all its tenderness holding a hint of barbaric roughness,” or revealing Miss Young's thoughts of her Mexican hosts as “a warmer, wilder people, with gallant gestures and languorous smiles” in “The Gold Vanity Set”.
[12] As T. Arab explains, “Don Ramón’s misrepresentation of the Indio continues with a series of ethnic generalizations that underscore the stereotyping of the indigenous peoples by the U.S. and Mexican upper-classes as uncivilized, emotional, irrational and child-like”.
[13] Similarly, in “The Education of Popo,” Alicia Cherry, judges the Mexican way of life on an American scale: “The summer flirtation of our happy land simply cannot be acclimated south of the Rio Grande.
In spite of references such as Miss Cherry's to Mexico's “picturesque atmosphere” in “The Education of Popo,” Mena's cast of characters explicitly avoid being confined to this stereotypical framework.
More obviously, Petra in “The Gold Vanity Set” rebels against Miss Young's desire to commodify her ‘picturesqueness’ by refusing to be photographed, and the Senorita in “The Vine Leaf” blots out her face in the esteemed painting that would literally put her figure in a frame.
More so, this article argues that Mena doesn’t “trust” that art and images are truthful representations of reality and Toth manages to describe her position without being completely biased to her own opinions.
[23] Her dyed hair and hoarding of Popo's affections represent American consumerism and “presented as questionable forms of cultural colonialism from the United States”.
[25] However, eyelid surgery was advertised as early as 1884 in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro; in 1891 in Havana; while in 1898, Jacques Joseph surgically modified noses in Berlin.
Ernestina in “Marriage by Miracle,” for example, uses plastic surgery to remove wrinkles and blemishes, and to modify her nose and eyes, so that her younger sister may marry.
Clarita urges her sister to wrinkle her forehead less in order to gain a husband, suggesting that Ernestina must remain passionless, and sacrifice her emotions for beauty.
The Ramos family “struggle to manipulate appearance for their own social advantage,” to the extent of having servants carry covered dishes that only have a meager meal underneath.
In her story “The Sorcerer and General Bisco,” for example, Carmelita rebels against marriage, a move that according to some critics “represents the increasingly active role of women from varied classes in the Mexican Revolution”.
The most explicit example of can be found in Mena's work “The Emotions of Maria Concepcion,” where the titular character falls in love with a Spanish matador, progressively establishing distance between herself and the control of her father.
This change begins subtly—“What feeling was this that dilated the fine nostrils of Maria Concepcion, and chilled the sacrificial of her heart?”[37]—and culminates in her avowal that she and her brother will go against their father's wishes and attend the climactic bullfight.
She criticizes the American conception of Latinos being tempestuous lovers—“She loved without a hope of ever touching her lover’s hand; and the thought of contact with his lips would have troubled her with a sense of passion desecrated – passion all powerful, but also all delicate, immaterial, and remote compared with that which the North too confidently assumes to read in the smoldering eyes of the South”[38]—a theme that is also echoed in the story “The Education of Popo,” where Alicia Cherry mentions that “The summer flirtation of our happy land simply cannot be acclimated south of the Rio Grande.
When the narrator describes the ancient Aztec legend told by her grandmother, the language switches to a more Spanish style, with verbs in front, in such phrases as "Arrived the autumn, and the afternoons became painted with rich reds".
[44] While the insertion of Spanish phrases and sentence structures in contrast to the high version of English that frames the story creates a unique local atmosphere, some critics have said that this juxtaposition is Mena's way of “[c]onfronting the difficulties of mediating between two cultures”.
[45] Indeed, Mena, through the voice of the narrator, suggests that she may have been unsatisfied with the resulting translation: “The sonorous imagery of those well-remembered phrases loses much in my attempt to render them in sober English”.
[45] However, critics have suggested that Mena employs a phenomenon called "double voicing" or using dramatic irony to expose the inadequacy of the stereotypical notions about Mexicans that can be found in her work.
[48] Double voicing as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin is when “[T]he author exaggerates, now strongly, now weakly, one or another aspect of the “common language,” sometimes abruptly exposing its inadequacy to its object and sometimes, on the contrary”.