A Re-mapping of Womanhood and Creativity: An Interview with Clara Oropeza, Ph.D.

PGI Alumni Clara Oropeza, Ph.D., is the author of A Re-mapping of Womanhood and Creativity: A Literary and Depth Psychological Perspective, which will be out in April. She will be giving the talk “A Reunion With the Feminine” on Pacifica Extension and International Studies on April 23 & 30, 2025, as well as a PEIS book talk on July 9, 2025. I’m delighted to speak with Clara about her work and experience studying and teaching in Santa Barbara.

Angela Borda: I’m so happy to meet you and learn more about your background. Perhaps we can start with a little about your youth and how you found your way to Pacifica?

Clara Oropeza: I am a first-generation daughter born to Mexican immigrant parents. I grew up in a traditional Latino household wherein my father was the breadwinner, and my mother was a homemaker devoted to her daughters and her husband. Our house followed a patriarchal-ordered world where the feminine was devalued. This planted an unconscious desire in me to be in allegiance to a matrilineal line. I went off to college in search of a literary family that spoke about claiming one’s feminine empowerment and essence. Then, in graduate school, I continued searching for Her vibration within my courses of literature and art. I hunted for images, metaphors and myths to give me a matrilineal line where I could ground all parts of me. This is the same yearning, essentially, that landed me at Pacifica in my late 30s.

Angela: What was your topic of focus during your degree at Pacifica and how did it interact with your current profession as a Professor at Santa Barbara City College, teaching literature and composition?

Clara: I was drawn to the study of comparative mythology because I have always been interested in the role that stories, both personal and collective, have in informing who we are. I believed in James Hillman’s idea, even before reading it, that “Archetypes allow us a psychological understanding on a collective level.” By the time I enrolled at Pacifica, I knew I wanted to do an archetypal analysis of Anaïs Nin’s 7 volume diaries. In my dissertation, among other topics, I dove into the topic of the trickstar (the female trickster) as the myth of the diarist, using Nin’s work as my focus.

As an English professor, woven into my pedagogy is an understanding that the power of narrative is propelled by a sense of universality. I want my students to be able to see the symbolic nature of their lives as they develop their voices and as they move towards a deeper understanding of themselves within the world.

Angela: Your first book was Anaïs Nin: A Myth of Her Own, and I see that you visit France regularly for readings and academic meetings. What was the process of studying Anais and visiting Paris like? What is the spark of inspiration that drew you to her?

My obsession with Paris began six years ago when after following Nin’s paper trail for my book, Anais Nin: A Myth of Her Own, I felt that an exploration of the city was necessary. That same year, I attended the SEM (Modernist Studies Society) conference of international researchers at the Sorbonne. I went to promote my book, and ever since, I have been either presenting at, or just attending, their annual conferences, which are held in various cities throughout France.

I go to Paris to visit Nin’s haunts—the locations she frequented throughout Paris and the various locations where she lived. I research remnants of what inspired her literary credo then, and what continues to feel alive today, especially with the ongoing call for women’s rights. I have to say that reading and studying a writer in the city where she wrote, for me, is equivalent to drinking wine in the region where the grapes were grown. There is a certain flavor of authenticity and inspiration with walking on the same ground that nurtured the fruit. I am looking forward to returning to my literary residency in Paris this coming summer to continue my research for my current project, which partially, once again, involves Nin and her Paris years.

Angela: You’ve gone from Anais to your second book, Re-mapping of Womanhood and Creativity, which “investigates the diverse ways in which women set out to find a matrilineal line as a well-spring for creative transformation.” I found that phrase interesting, “finding a matrilineal line.” It might indicate that this is not necessarily a map of genealogy, but of intentional, perhaps even imaginal kinship. Is that correct? What is the basic idea and inspiration here?

Clara: It is about genealogy, but I am expanding the concept to the symbolic as well as the literal. Essentially, I wanted to be connected to the women who have reared me in a literary and personal way.

I approach this topic from an archetypal perspective that is grounded in the works of some of my literary mothers. They gave me the focus to write A Re-mapping of Womanhood and Creativity. For example, I was guided by Virginia Woolf’s vision that “a woman writing thinks back to her mothers.” Woolf knew women need to know the strong history of women’s creations. We need to know in our bodies that women have created important things; art, philosophy, science, psychology – being that so much of our education is masculine authored. This has psychological impacts, which often has consequences in our relationship to the feminine in our lives, including that of our mothers.

Also, Woolf reminds us that we need to expand the historical record of women’s experiences and creativity to include the lives of our personal mothers. She argues that we must know the conditions of the “average woman’s life.” I love this idea! But, I also feel that in a socially divided Victorian society, Woolf would have overlooked women like my mother and my grandmother who grew up in Mexico in poverty. So, thinking back through my own matrilineal line, literary and personal, I set out to investigate those marginalized narratives about the feminine experience that shape our understanding of womanhood. I came to realize that they, too, are worthy of academic inquiry.

In contrast to Woolf, Gloria Anzaldúa captures it well when she writes that she grounds her Chicana identity in “the Indian women’s history of resistance.” This quote has a lot of resonance for me because of my indigenous heritage.

Woolf and Anzaldua, among others, remind me that the connection between the need to express ourselves as women is the same yearning to be intimate with a matrilineal line.

Angela: What is the connection between the mother relationship and our creativity? And how does depth psychology play a role in how you approach the topic?

Clara: The connection between the mother-daughter relationships and our creativity is about giving in to the yearning to search for a matrilineal lineage to which one could belong. While this connection starts with one’s personal mother; it ultimately lands one in the heart of a search for the inner mother.

This is where depth psychology plays into my work. I explore various archetypes, such as the Great mother, the role she plays in our quest to find mothering. I am interested in the role that healing our maternal wound plays in our own individuation. Along this path is an invitation to examine the archetype of the devoted and the resentful daughter. Also located on this path is a source of confidence in the power of art, of our stories, to unearth meaning and truth in ordinary lives and events.

So, creating a mother map, for me, has meant creating a path towards understanding my grief, trauma, and how it came to be, alongside the narratives of resistance in my matrilineal line. The act of reclaiming our stories—our matrilineal lineage—is a way to be in a new relationship to the feminine in our lives. I propose that this new proximity to the feminine enriches our creativity.

Angela: I think I speak for many women when I say that healing the mother wound is one of the most profound and difficult pieces of work, if you happen to have been born to a mother who is unable to be present in a positive way in your life, whether it’s due to mental illness, addiction, or a lineage of abuse within the family. How do you navigate this in your book, in terms of the mother wound and how to work with it?

Clara: In my book, I focus on three pairs of mother-daughter relationships that I hope offers readers insights into the varying pathways towards healing. Like all of our wounds, the maternal wound is complex, and the ways towards healing are deeply personal. Yet, I hope that the questions I pose and the insights I explore will provide readers the possibility of healing. One of the ways that I write about having reached the shores of understanding my maternal wound was through questioning the narratives I was made to believe about my mother while I was growing up. By seeking and discovering her story, from her gaze, I gained a deeper understanding of who she is, the struggles she endured and prevailed from, and of her strength. I want to be emphatic that healing our maternal wound is ultimately for us, the daughters. But that our mother does not have to be alive, or actively participate in this journey, to engage in this type of healing. In my book, I point out that each experience is unique. For example, Nin’s experiences with her mother offers insights from another perspective with healing a maternal wound, and that my mother’s experience with her own Goddess mother, La Virgen de Guadalupe offers another. Regardless of one’s individual experience, I propose that healing our maternal wound ultimately leads to an inquiry to love all parts of ourselves.

Angela: A reviewer, in praising the book, said, “This book is sure to spark important conversations about the unique challenges and opportunities faced by women of color in claiming our creative power and healing the mother wound.” Can you share with us more about this aspect of the book?

Clara: It is my hope that the chronicles of my mother’s and my life, despite existing amidst the paradoxes of the machismo Latin culture, will be illuminating for other women of color who have had similar experiences. For example, many of us have been raised by assertive fathers whose views on women were that they were the weaker sex. We have learned to define “strength” as a trait associated only with the masculine, as exemplified by our fathers. While our fathers raised us to be strong and independent, at the same time we were left on our own to make sense of what that meant in relationship to our womanhood. Also, many of us (Latinas) were raised to revere the Virgen de Guadalupe, the archetype of motherhood, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. In Mexican society, La Virgen de Guadalupe is a reminder that virginity is venerated more than motherhood. I write about some of my mother’s experiences as she contended with the domineering patriarchy, and the double standards it put upon women of my mother’s generation. I came to understand that her tolerance and perseverance with her handling of various life challenges were not signs of weaknesses and inferiority. Instead, these were her traits of strength and shrewdness—all part of her survival instincts and self-sacrifice for protecting and providing a better life for her daughters.

The interviews with my mother were deeply profound and personal to both of us. For my mother, who now is in her early 80’s, this came as a day-of-reckoning and reflection of her life journey and how much she had accomplished. This helped her understand the strength and power that she possessed all along her individuation path, as she maneuvered the years and the dictates of the Mexican machismo world. Her reflections are no longer of shame or guilt, but of proud self-accomplishment and actualization. She has been released and able to heal her maternal wound. For me, it has helped me to better understand what my mother, my sisters, and I contended with but could not quite understand because of the unspoken dictates and confines put upon us. The research for my book has personally been liberating and has released the emotional yearning that I sought to quell from other outside sources.

Angela: Thank you so much for speaking with me today and I look forward to more of your work.

Clara: It was a pleasure. Thank you for your thoughtful questions. I look forward to our next conversation.

A Re-mapping of Womanhood and Creativity: A Literary and Depth Psychological Perspective will be available for preorder on April 4th and will be mailed out on April 24th.

To register for her two PEIS talks:  “A Reunion With the Feminine” April 23 & 30, 2025, and “A Re-mapping of Womanhood and Creativity: A Literary and Depth Psychological” book talk July 9, 2025.