Loca's funeral procession is only one of several important public rituals in the novel. A second important procession is the pilgrimage to Chimayo or Tsimayo. The alternate spellings and different pronunciations of this sacred site—"ch" versus "ts"—highlight the distinction between Catholic and indigenous traditions of worship at this site: Castillo uses the "ch" spelling when describing doña Felicia's annual Lenten Week trip, but offers the "ts" spelling when locating the site within "the land of the Tewa." Embedded in each spelling of the word is a distinct cultural, social, political, and economic history of divergent populations defining the same space for themselves. Although the use of the Spanish sound "ch" may appear to be simply an attempt to render the sound of native pronunciation in Spanish, the effort to make the word part of the.....
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