"A Convenient Hallway for Men to Pass Through": Chicana Adolescence and the San Diego City Space in Patricia Santana's Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility

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• "A Convenient Hallway for Men to Pass Through"Chicana Adolescence and the San Diego City Space in Patricia Santana's Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility
• Cristina Herrera (bio)

In her seminal study ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement Maylei Blackwell reminds scholars that investigating Chicana contributions and their presence during the heyday of activist struggle requires us to "look more closely at localized political spaces so that we can put women back into a history they had a role in shaping" (34). Rather than look solely at what she dubs "hero narratives" (34), which obscure, bury, or otherwise erase Chicanas' crucial roles in liberation movements, anti-Vietnam War efforts, and educational activism, Blackwell asks us what it means to delve into those spaces occupied by women, including homes, local neighborhoods, and barrios, to glimpse those histories and experiences that have always existed. Further, as this article underscores, to acknowledge the multitude of Chicana youth experiences during a politically fraught period in Chicanx and US history, such as the Vietnam War era, we must be willing to examine regions that are critical to Chicanx activist histories but are often overlooked, much as young Chicanas are seldom seen as important subjects in their own right. For example, in Chicana young adult (YA) literature, Chicana protagonists often make sense of their subjectivities through and within the navigation of their neighborhoods and urban or rural home spaces, narratives that privilege youth as a lens to understand themes of community, activism, family, and history.¹ The YA novel explored in this article, Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility,² reverts to the year 1969 in the border city of San Diego, California. Time and space occupy much of this [End Page 1] text's tensions, as I will discuss. Motorcycle Ride's classification as a Vietnam War narrative offers a distinct imagining of issues such as gender, mobility, and space, factors that are undergirded by the text's central tension: the Chicana teen protagonist's navigation of her home and urban space during a politically tumultuous moment in Chicanx, US, and broader global history.³

This article focuses on Patricia Santana's 2002 novel Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility, a YA text that uses the genre of historical fiction to offer a critical examination of a teenage Chicana's fraught coming-of-age set against the backdrop of her beloved brother's return from service during the Vietnam War in April of 1969. Motorcycle Ride remains a rich addition within the context of Chicanx narratives of war, which have a long tradition in Chicanx literature (Olguín 83). While an important text in the extensive body of work on Chicanx war fiction, and one of the few Chicanx YA titles to treat this subject,⁴ the novel itself has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. Santana's novel undoubtedly fits within the tradition of Chicanx war literature,⁵ but what is equally significant is how Santana emphasizes a spatially focused account of fourteen-year-old protagonist Yolanda "Yoli" Sahagún's gendered and racialized coming-of-age within the context of Chicanx activism during the Vietnam War and alongside the shifting racial/spatial dynamics in the broader San Diego region that impacted Mexican/Chicanx border residents.

Thus, I argue that Yolanda comes to understand her positionality as an adolescent Chicana via her observations and critiques of how her family home, her San Diego barrio, and the surrounding urban environment constrain, threaten, and even violate the bodies of young women of color. I provide a brief discussion of the San Diego region's significance within Chicanx activist history to contextualize Yolanda's Chicana adolescent narrative within a text that takes great pains in highlighting the unique sacrifices wrought by communities of color who witnessed their loved ones serve and die in such a deeply unpopular war. If novels like Santana's examine "the toll that war takes on relationships between Chicanas as mothers, daughters, or sisters" (Herrera, "Chicana Casualties" 2), the text further offers a gendered, youth-oriented critique of Yolanda's navigation of her neighborhood and home during a socially and politically fraught period [End Page 2...