Latina writers twist the "descent into the underworld" motif, not to negate its symbolic significance, but to problematize the effectiveness of such spiritual journeys that endorse unequivocally male traditions.  Like previous modernists, Latina writers are less interested in past allegiances (and by extension in traditional, literary patterns of structure and theme), as they are in discovering the present and looking toward the future.  Gloria Anzaldúa's short story "People Should not Die in June in South Texas" switches, almost immediately, from the solemn funeral of her father "Urbano, loved by all," to a sarcastic mocking of the entire graveyard ritual: "after two and a half days, her father has begun to smell like a cow whose carcass has been gutted by vultures. People should not die in June in south Texas" (Augenbraum and Stavans  280).  Compared to Candelaria's opening, Anzaldúa's story privileges the details of a rotting corpse, the incisions and fluids of the embalming and the price of coffins over the mythical significance of her heroine's growth.  In fact, Prietita's growth comes from recognition, four years later, that the dead are simply dead, that the ritual of the wake has little to do with her life (after a few days she is just as "invisible and invincible" in the black of mourning as she was before).  

            Anzaldúa rejects the power of the dead, the influence of the corpse (the Antigone archetype) over the living, yet in her sheer practicality, she is atypical of Latino writers who, in general, exploit the hazy territory of the spaces between fact and belief, between life and death.  The story actually seems to repudiate the famous line from Rulfo's Pedro Paramo: "The dead carry more weight than the living." Anzaldúa argues in Borderlands / La Frontera that the descent motif is symbolic of the artist's Shamanistic endeavor to understand the oppositions and "duality" in life.  Through a hazy mid-state of sickness and health, sleep and waking, the artist can "jump blindfolded into the abyss of her own being and there in the depths confront her face, the face underneath the mask" (74).   In her story, however, there is no chance of the little girl's bridging the gap between Mictlán (69) or Miktlán (48), the "region of the dead" and her daily life.  Perhaps this is true because the ancestral patriarchal chain of the dead male offers nothing that she as a woman can use.  The journey toward the dead is, for Latina writers, often sterile and pointless when it follows the roots of the father. Anzaldúa's stressing the physical deterioration of the deceased father figure indicates that she'd have the young heroine look elsewhere for her identity than in patriarchal tradition. 

            For Ana Castillo the journey back to Mexican heritage is problematic, since just as more and more Mexican women cross the border in search of work and then return with mixed ideas about their rights and positions in traditional society, so Teresa in The Mixquiahuala Letters finds difficulty with Mexico's age-old attitudes about female behavior and gender roles in society.  Teresa is drawn by her "devotion to the culture that preceded European influence" (49) to the "pre-Columbian village of obscurity" (19) referred to in the title.  Her name is perhaps an allusion to Theresa the wife of the autocratic José Rafa since Candelaria's "Chicana flapper," Theresa, embodies the independence, modernity, and rebelliousness that Castillo's Teresa would admire.  After all, Theresa Rafa is "a fighter who wanted more" (Candelaria 141) and resents her husband's racism (78).  She forces him to escape his stifling autocratic family and is the only character in Memories of the Alhambra to recognize the "Spanish forebearers' cruelty in the men and in the women that docility that came from the Indian ancestors that they would deny" (62).  Castillo's heroine's journey (presumably paralleling the reader's "journey"[vi]), recollected piece by piece in the letters that constitute the book is an encounter with both the authenticity of her Mexican / Indian roots and the traps and taboos for women within that culture.  Like all Latinas, she must mark herself as an individual without sacrificing the benefits provided by the Latin American communal and family systems.  At one point, Castillo's letters speak of returning to "ancient Tenochtitlan, home of my mother, grandmothers, and greatmother, as embracing bosom, to welcome me back and rock my weary body and mind to sleep..." (92).  Yet moments later, she undercuts the mythic edenic womb image by recalling her actual arrival and being "shuffled out like excess cargo, placed in a cab and sent away...to the family of a friend" (92).  "Mexican hospitality did indeed have its limits" (93).  Teresa's outsider's perspective allows her to see how Mexico "embraces as it strangulates" (59).  She starts to find herself a "snag" in Mexico's societal pattern (59).  As Alarcón has argued, Teresa is "forced to recall that she is not as free as she thought" (98) when confronted by the restrictions of Mexican women.  Her southern journey, her symbolic descent, "down, down, for days and nights" (60) thus enhances the ambiguities of her identity,[vii] ultimately uniting her with other Castillo heroines who embrace the unfixed hybridity of mestizo consciousness.  Yvonne Yarbo-Bejarano draws parallels between Teresa's multiple subjectivity (67) and Pastura's (the heroine of Castillo's second novel Sapagonia) divided nature whose nickname, Coatlicue, suggests again the "goddess of the union of opposites" (Yarbo-Bejarano 68).  In Sapagonia, it is the "anti-hero" Maximo Madrigal whose quest is portrayed as he travels south to rescue his Mayan grandmother from revolutionaries.  Having only belatedly switched his search for roots from a paternal direction (from which he learns little about himself) to a maternal one, he finds his "abuela" dead and so the search fails.  Unlike the semi-revolutionary Sofi, Maximo doesn't recognize a need to depart from male tradition, and, in a manner similar to Tom Cardona in the Garcia story, his loss of connection to the abuela leaves him stranded.  He "functions," according to Gómez-Vega, "within an intrinsically male-identified culture...that values the mythological male hero's separation from the community" (244) while Castillo's articulation of the descent motif clearly emphasizes the positive female side of her Latin American cultural and familial ties.  As Maximo journeys "away from communion into solitude" (Gómez-Vega 244), the novel advocates the Latina's need to progress in the opposite direction.

           Though Castillo's epistolary novel allows for a "Conformist" reading (the first of three possible orderings of the chapters) such a reading is clearly the least attractive to the ethnographer/author[viii] because it confirms what Yarbo-Bejarano calls the "maternal dictates" of traditional Mexican women (67-68).  If the past is essential in forming identities, the errors within past traditions must also be understood.  According to Sofi, the heroine matriarch in So Far From God, the "conformist" is despicable, or as her daughter Esperanza says, someone "who just didn't give a damn about nothing" (139).  To conform is to acquiesce, to bow to the forces of the powers that be.  Such is the fate of Sofi's daughter, Fe who, betrayed by her romantic lover, pursues the elusive American financial dream into the Acme weapons plant and dies of cancer from toxic cleaning fluids.  As her name suggests, misguided "faith" in her bosses proves fatal, her obedience deadly, and, on an allegorical level, faith in the system dies with her.  In fact, Castillo writes: "she did not resurrect...Fe just died. And when someone dies that plain dead, it is hard to talk about" (186).  Sofi, on the other hand, becomes mayor of Tome and gains a permanent voice to "speak her mind" as a woman and for women (157), positioning herself to rewrite the town, to edit the "Tome."   

            For Cristina Garcia as well, the concept of seeking out one's heritage is valid, provided the journey is properly directed along matrilineal lines.  Thus early in the novel, the young heroine, Pilar Puente travels south by bus to Florida on her way toward Cuba.  On the bus, Pilar meets Minnie French, a woman "weirdly old-looking for a young person" (27).  Minnie tells Pilar that she is the "last of thirteen children," that her born-again mother died giving birth to her and that she is in route to Florida to get an abortion.   If Pilar's journey is to truly result in increased understanding and a symbolic "rebirth" into greater maturity through connection with the past, then this encounter on the bus with its emphasis on death and sterility is inauspicious.  In fact, Pilar's trip will end in Florida which, politically at least, is decidedly not Cuba.  Moreover, she will wind up trapped in the house of her father's patriarchal family.  Abuela Zaida, her father's sister, uses the collective "we" to include only men and to exclude women, and Pilar's grandfather from the old world likes his wife to call him "Don Guillermo."  This "blustery caballero's" flagrant macho behavior once led him to kill an innocent dog which had been trying to drag the year and a half year old Pilar out of the street where she had wandered.  We know early in the novel that Pilar is in search of a fading connection with her grandmother, Abuela Celia, with whom she shares birthdays.  Reacting to the falsity of her mother's exaggerated patriotic bakery and her father's adultery, Pilar leaves New York in search of a truth somehow associated with her grandmother's visionary, mystical world.  As the character Minnie foreshadows, however, this first Florida trip proves to be a sterile journey in terms of Pilar's psychological development.  She winds up getting drenched in the tropical rain, locked outside the home of her paternal grandparents.  Pilar's genuine journey, the one that will establish the authentic relationship between her and her past will occur eight years later, for six April days in Cuba, and this experience, rather than the initial bus trip, will restore Pilar to a sense of herself and at the same time bridge (as her name, "puente," suggests) the gap between the island and the U.S., the past and her present.