A Literary History of the American West

Contemporary Mexican-American Literature,
1960–Present

MEXICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE grew dramatically in the 1960s, fueled largely by an unprecedented surge of ethnic pride and a renewed awareness that literary works could be political and cultural instruments of great power. This is not to suggest that Mexican-American writers of the period neglected esthetic quality but rather to emphasize that they regarded themselves as participants in an historic campaign of social activism. Luis Valdez, for example, founded the Teatro Campesino to win public support for California farm workers. Mexican-American poets created bilingual verse to celebrate their dual heritage, and writers of fiction undertook to demolish longstanding stereotypes of Mexican-American inferiority. While it is certainly proper to view these literary activities as part of the broad phenomenon of minority expression associated with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, it is important to note that Mexican-American writing has always evinced a distinctive character. This distinctiveness rose out of careful efforts to reproduce the patterns of Mexican-American speech, to either appropriate or emulate folk traditions, and to utilize Latin American narrative forms and techniques.

Undoubtedly, the single event of the 1960s which most clearly galvanized Mexican-American ethnic consciousness and pride and consequently spurred considerable literary productivity was the effort of César Chávez to establish a strong farm workers' union. Chávez and FilipinoAmerican Larry Itliong had begun to organize the predominantly Mexicanand Filipino-American ranks of California farm workers in 1962. Three years later, he and Itliong stunned the agricultural industry by calling a series of strikes in the fields around Delano, the most notable of which was a prolonged action against the growers of table grapes. Chávez's strike attracted national attention and helped to arouse interest in a wide range of Mexican-American issues. Thus did the movimiento get underway.

As indicated before, the most significant literary result of the farm workers' struggle was the formation of the Teatro Campesino in 1965. Luis Valdez, its founder, came from a family of farm workers and had returned to his hometown of Delano with the idea of exercising his talents as a playwright, director, and actor on behalf of Chávez's union. The collaboration proved immediately productive. For Valdez, the farm workers' cause provided a rich source of dramatic material while Chávez benefited from the fundraising and polemical skills of the Teatro.

The early performances of the Teatro–and these occurred in every imaginable setting from open fields and flatbed trucks to university auditoriums–were built around a series of actos, ten to fifteen minute improvised skits that dramatized the circumstances of the farm workers. Rooted in the traditions of commedia dell'arte and Mexican carpa presentations and influenced by contemporary agitprop techniques, the Teatro managed simultaneously to entertain its audiences and prod them toward social awareness and action. Working generally without either sets or props, the Teatro addressed sensitive political issues unambiguously, even reductively. Typically, the Teatro utilized caricatures and stock characters (many easily identifiable because of signs hung around their necks) to delineate issues: the leering, villainous "Patrón" (Boss or farm owner) who pretends to be the friend of workers; "Super Sam," the arrogant and brutal Anglo cop; the "Coyote," a Mexican-American labor contractor who exploits his own people; and, of course, the humble but dignified farm worker who, against all odds, comes to understand his oppression and then fights valiantly to bring justice to the fields.

By 1967, the Teatro Campesino had begun to enlarge its focus beyond strictly farm worker issues. That year, the Teatro first performed Los vendidos (The SellOuts), a humorous and devastating depiction of Mexican-American assimilation. No saco nada de la escuela (I'm Not Getting Anything out of School) traces the failure of the American educational system to respond to the special needs of Mexican-American students. By the early 1970s, the Teatro was creating actos which denounced the Vietnam War. In Vietnam campesino and Soldado razo (Chicano Soldier), infantry duty in Vietnam for the Mexican-American is presented as another form of exploitation, deadlier than, but closely related to, the oppressiveness of farm labor.

The most ambitious project undertaken by Luis Valdez and various members of the Teatro Campesino was Zoot Suit, a full-scale commercial production which had a long run in Los Angeles in 1978–79. The play was based on the notorious Sleepy Lagoon episode of 1942–43 and its aftermath. A young man had died mysteriously as a result of injuries suffered near a popular East Los Angeles swimming hole. In the most blatant kangaroo-court circumstances, seventeen Mexican-American youths were subsequently convicted of manslaughter and assault. After the trial, antiMexican sentiment in Los Angeles intensified and resulted in a number of attacks on flamboyantly dressed Mexican-Americans–so-called "zoot-suiters" or pachucos–by policemen and servicemen. As Valdez's most sustained work, Zoot Suit betrays deficiencies of structure and characterization but is otherwise a considerable achievement and a landmark in Mexican-American writing. Subtitled A New American Play, Zoot Suit represents Valdez's attempt not only to reach beyond an ethnic audience but to thrust Mexican-American experience into the center of American history. The major figure of the play is "El Pachuco," the archetypal, ultimate zoot-suiter who swaggers in and out of the action and offers wise and cynical observations from the sidelines, a sort of Greek chorus reinvented as Chicano hipster. "El Pachuco" revels in his distinctiveness and outrageousness but pays a heavy price: he is, inevitably, beaten and stripped of his "drapes" by Anglo sailors. The play suggests that Anglo-Americans, never notably tolerant of conspicuous ethnic behavior, resented the pachuco with particular vehemence during wartime. The "American Way of Life" was being threatened externally by the Germans and the Japanese and now the puchuco, in his refusal to accept assimilation, was perceived as an internal menace. The character "El Pachuco" is finally vindicated, however. Near the end of the play he reappears, dressed as gaudily as before, his spirit of defiance intact, and ascends to mythic stature. "It is the secret fantasy of every vato," he proclaims, "to put on the zoot suit and play the part of the pachuco." As Valdez presents him, "El Pachuco" symbolizes the Mexican-American's insistence on maintaining his ethnic identity even as he accepts his obligations as a citizen of the United States. The most poignant irony of Zoot Suit is that even in the face of widespread bigotry and degradation, the pachucos were willing to fight for their country.

In the wake of the Teatro Campesino's early successes, Mexican-American literary activity grew rapidly. In 1967, Quinto Sol Publications began operations in Berkeley with the express purpose of providing an outlet for Mexican-American writers. Two years later, Quinto Sol issued El Espejo (The Mirror), an anthology which clearly indicated the distinctiveness and vitality of Mexican-American literary expression.

Writing for a Mexican-American publisher and directing their works at a predominantly Mexican-American audience, the writers of Quinto Sol were disencumbered of the heavy load of literary explanation and justification of some earlier writers who, with few options, composed their works for Anglo readers. The new generation of authors strove to create a distinctive body of Mexican-American (or Chicano) literature, one that evoked and preserved its cultural experiences without condescension and which was founded in its own oral and belletristic traditions. The Quinto Sol writers reaffirmed their ties to Mexico and Latin America and celebrated their aboriginal heritage. They appropriated Aztec philosophy and imagery and found particular usefulness in the concept of Aztlán, the ancestral home of the Aztecs thought to be located somewhere in the American Southwest. The idea of Aztlán, either explicitly or implicitly, became the controlling metaphor for the Quinto Sol and later activist Mexican-American authors who regarded themselves not as immigrants or members of a deprived minority but as heirs to traditions which formed the core of southwestern culture. Some scholars quibbled that the concept of Aztlán was historically insupportable, but they missed the point; its importance was mythic and symbolic, providing Mexican-American writers with a powerful sense of "place" and continuity. They could describe their experiences from Texas to California so vividly and securely precisely because they believed that their people had always been there.

The Quinto Sol writers recognized the plasticity of language in conveying the distinctiveness of their culture and thus utilized, in their poetry and fictions, a variety of linguistic techniques. Earlier Mexican writers had rendered their works in either conventional English or Spanish while others such as Josephina Niggli had tried to reproduce the flavor of Spanish in English, occasionally employing the original Spanish for special effect. The results of these techniques were often quite satisfactory but they failed to capture Mexican-American speech effectively. The Quinto Sol writers used not only conventional Spanish and English but various regional dialects of both languages and combinations of all of these. They employed characteristic Mexican-American neologisms such as "wachar" (to watch), "vato" (guy or dude), and "troca" or "troque" (truck). Many of them sought to utilize Mexican-American street language–sometimes called caló–as a fully expressive literary idiom.

Linguistic experimentation was one of the most striking characteristics of Mexican-American literature of the late 1960s) particularly in poetry. Among the various poets whose work first came to widespread attention in the publications of Quinto Sol was José Montoya, a Californian with a certain ear for Mexican-American speech and a profound understanding of Mexican-American culture. Probably his best-known poem is "El Louie," a haunting elegy to a friend from the streets, a pachuco named Louie Rodríguez who is found dead in a rented room, presumably of alcoholism. The poem begins with these lines:

Hoy enterraron al Louie

And San Pedro o sanpinche
are in for it. And those
times of the forties
and the early fifties
lost un vato de atolle.
Kind of slim and drawn
there toward the end,
aging fast from too much
booze y la vida dura. But
class to the end.

The power and poignancy of the poem derives from Montoya's ability to shift from Mexican-American Spanish to English, locating in one idiom or another the precise phrase necessary to evoke a desired response. Significantly, the poem begins in Spanish–thus fixing the special ethnic quality of the work. The second line opens in English but moves to a word, "san pinche," which conveys a compelling image in Spanish but is virtually untranslatable into English. The succeeding chronological references are straightforwardly rendered, these also followed by a vivid, distinctive phrase in Spanish, "un vato de atolle," whose meaning can only be limply approximated in English as "the great dude." The last Spanish phrase in the "la vida dura" translates easily as "the hard life" but because it is presented in Spanish calls attention to the specific nature of a Mexican-American's circumstances. "El Louie"demonstrates how a poem's esthetic and perceptional qualities can be greatly enhanced by the poet's bilingualism and biculturalism. America, we discover from "El Louie," looks and sounds different from the barrio.

Quinto Sol published not only a large variety of innovative poetry but prose as well. One of the earliest and most accomplished prose works issued by Quinto Sol was Tomás Rivera's " . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra" (And the Earth Did Not Part). This collection of fictional anecdotes and sketches– which together may be regarded as composing, in D. H. Lawrence's phrase, "a fragmentary novel"–focuses on Mexican-American migrant workers of South Texas during the 1950s. Whereas an earlier Mexican-American writer, José Antonio Villarreal, had depicted a Mexican-American family that was all but blown apart by assimilationist pressures, Rivera's work proclaims a people's vitality despite almost unspeakable hardships. ". . . y no se lo tragó la tierra" opens on a note suggestive of several Latin-American writers, especially Borges and García Márquez, in that it obscures the boundary between reality and fantasy:

That year was lost to him. Sometimes he tried to remember, but then when things appeared to become somewhat clear his thoughts would elude him. It usually began with a dream in which suddenly he thought he was awake, and then he would realize he was actually asleep. That was why he could not be sure whether or not what he had recalled was actually what had happened.

Imagined or not, the events described (primarily by an anonymous narrator) have the ring of painful truth. In the opening sketch, a young farm worker is shot through the head by his foreman; later we see children searching for food in a garbage dump; still later, two children burn to death in a migrant worker's shack. Rivera describes all these events in a spare, detached manner, very much in the style of Juan Rulfo in El llano en llamas (The Plain in Flames).

Structurally, ". . . y no se lo tragó la tierra" consists of twelve sketches (representing the months of the narrator's lost year), each introduced by a brief anecdote, and an introduction and closing. The book resembles a literary collage of Mexican-American migrant-worker subculture. The narrative device of anonymity enhances the representational quality of the work; Rivera, for the most part, is not depicting distinct individuals but an assortment of poor people bound in a common experience.

". . . y no se lo tragó la tierra" is a profoundly humanistic work. In one sketch, the nameless young protagonist of the book goes out at midnight to summon the devil, first by cajoling him, and then, in desperation, by hurling invectives. The devil never appears, of course, and in the following story, the boy is so embittered by a series of family tragedies that he proceeds to curse God, a sacrilege which should result, or so his mother has told him, in his being swallowed up by the earth. But, surprisingly, the earth feels firmer than it had before and the boy suddenly "felt himself capable of doing and undoing whatever he chose." In Rivera's fictional world, there is neither God nor Satan, only human will.

Rivera is no apologist for his fictional Mexican-Americans, nor for their culture. In his remarkable sketch "La mano en la bolsa" (His Hand in His Pocket), Rivera presents don Laíto and doña Boni, two grotesques of unsurpassed vulgarity and cruelty; in a later piece he introduces a Chicano con man who collects money for portraits but never delivers them. Like other Mexican-American writers, Rivera vigorously attacks the Catholic Church for its exploitation of the poor and its preoccupation with the human potentiality not for good but for evil. Still, Rivera's main interest lies in characters like the nameless boy who finally discovers that knowledge and wisdom can be salvaged from any experience:

Suddenly he felt very happy because . . . he realized that he hadn't lost anything. He had discovered something. To discover and to rediscover and synthesize. To relate this entity with that entity, and that entity with still another, and finally relating everything with everything else. That was what he had to do, that was all. And he became even happier. Later, when he arrived at home, he went to the tree that was in the yard. He climbed it. On the horizon he saw a palm tree and he imagined that someone was on top looking at him. He even raised his arm and waved it back and forth so that the other person could see that he knew that he was there.

In " . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra," the nameless young protagonist must learn that the gift of life, even in the harshest circumstances, is to be profoundly cherished. In the work of Rolando Hinojosa, another writer who got his career underway with Quinto Sol, this perception serves not as a climactic insight but as a fundamental premise. In the beginning of Generaciones y semblanzas (Generations and Biographies), the narrator explains:

These are no legendary heroes here. These people go to the toilet, they sneeze and blow their noses, they raise families, know how to die with one eye on guard, and they yield with difficulty like most green wood and thus do not crack easily. Those seeking heroes of the caliber of El Cid, say, can very well go to Hell and stay there.
It's true that there are several ways of being heroic. It's no laughing matter to work from day to day, putting up with any damn fool who shows up along the way. One thing should be clear however: to endure is not to ignore things or to deceive oneself. Bearing one's burden doesn't mean that one is a blind fool unaware of what's really going on.
People suspect that living by itself is heroic enough. The rest of it, bearing whatever life brings, is heroic as well.

Hinojosa's work differs from Rivera's in other ways as well. While Rivera's tone is serious and generally melancholy, and his sense of outrage simmers just beneath the surface of his narratives, Hinojosa's fictions are humorous and ironic: he regards the gamut of human behavior from saintliness to depravity with compassion and tolerance. Furthermore, Hinojosa sweeps over a much broader range of Mexican-American experience than Rivera, speaking through the voices of various characters, some named and others anonymous. Hinojosa's works vibrate with the sounds of barrios and colonias: family gossip, conversation about Anglos, children chanting Mexican rhymes. As one of his narrators describes the activity of the writer, Hinojosa "without anyone's leave, goes out into the street and takes a little bit from here and there."

Despite these differences, however, Hinojosa's work also resembles Rivera's in certain ways. Both use South Texas heavily as settings and both render their works in a combination of conventional and pocho Spanish. Like Rivera, Hinojosa's most successful prose form is the sketch, some of which are no longer than two paragraphs. In this regard, as Herminio Ríos has pointed out, Hinojosa seems a kindred spirit of Julio Torri who, in popularizing the estampa in Mexico, argued that the greatest defect in literature was excessive explication. In an opening note to his Estampas del valle y otras obras (Sketches of the Valley and Other Works), Hinojosa writes: "The people who appear and disappear in these sketches, as well as the events that occur in them, may not be real. The writer writes and tries to do what he can. Explaining all this is the function of others . . . "

Hinojosa's two most successful works, Estampas and Generaciones y semblanzas (a title first used by the Spaniard Fernán Pérez de Guzmán about 1450), provide a vivid portrait of Belken County, a fictional locale in the Rio Grande valley of South Texas. Several families in Belken, notably the Buenrostros, can trace their presence there to the eighteenth century. As the reader follows their experiences across several generations, he is presented a mosaic of border Mexican-American culture.

The dominant characteristic of Hinojosa's Mexican-Americans is a dignified fatalism, an understanding that man is not always the keeper of his destiny. His characters struggle against economic and political oppression but recognize their human limitations. In a sketch entitled "Thus It Was Fulfilled," the anonymous narrator, on the occasion of a friend's premature death, observes:"There are people born that way, branded and singled out as if someone were saying: you're going to be that way, you this way, and you this other way; in short, as always, man proposes and God disposes." Hinojosa's Mexican-Americans aim not to conquer but to endure, to endure with courage and dignity.

Together, Rivera and Hinojosa exemplified many of the best trends among the Quinto Sol writers. Like Montoya and some other poets, they sought to demonstrate that Mexican-American speech was not a linguistic barbarism but a sophisticated language capable of conveying the full range of emotion and action. In embracing Latin-American literary principles and techniques, they helped to reinforce the cultural ties between their people and other Latinos. But the major achievement of Rivera and Hinojosa was to reaffirm the primacy of the common people as the guardians and transmitters of Mexican-American culture. In communicating this view to their readers, both writers infused their stories with folkloric elements. Their use of plain and proverbial language (especially in the case of Hinojosa), their focus on ordinary experiences, their use of multiple and anonymous narrators, and their deliberate deemphasis of authorial control give their works a spontaneous, proletarian quality, but one that springs from a specific ethnic consciousness. One of Hinojosa's sketches, appropriately entitled "Voices from the Barrio," ends with this observation: "The barrios can be called el Rebaje, el de las Conchas, el Cantarranas, el Rincon del Diablo, el Pueblo Mexicano–really names don't matter much. What does count, as always, are the people."

It is a rather self-evident principle of Mexican-American writing that those authors who compose in Spanish are likely to follow Latin-American literary conventions and styles while those who write in English will likely follow Anglo-American trends. Rudolfo Anaya, one more novelist of the early Quinto Sol group, writes in English but nevertheless manages to convey a distinctly Mexican-American perspective. His first and most satisfying work, Bless Me, Ultima, is a moving portrait, reminiscent in some ways of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist us a Young Man, of a boy, Antonio Márez, coming of age during the 1940s in a remote village in central New Mexico. The novel focuses on Antonio's attempt to forge an identity in an environment of conflicting cultures and expectations as represented by the two branches of his family: his father's people who are ranchers and horsemen, a restless, powerful clan who cherish the rugged life on the high plains of New Mexico; and his mother's family–the Lunas–who are sedentary, tradition-bound, rigidly Catholic farmers. Antonio is the last of four sons and the others have not turned out well, having gone off to war and returned jaded and contemptuous of their heritage. To guard against a similar calamity, Antonio's parents entrust him to Ultima, a curandera (healer) of immense wisdom and compassion. Antonio discovers that Ultima's greatness derives from her accumulated understanding of her people's experience, their values, and customs. While other characters in the novel seem confused and disheartened, Ultima retains an unshakable sense of identity and purpose. Her gift to Antonio is the lesson of honoring one's culture without being trammeled by it, of using one's cultural identity as the foundation for the development of an individual spirit. "Build strength from life," Ultima counsels Antonio and, indeed, his life under tutelage becomes a storehouse of cultural riches. At the end of the novel, with the mushroom clouds of the White Sands nuclear tests looming above the southern horizon, Antonio rejects the confining traditionalism of the Lunas in favor of the Márez's doctrine of personal freedom.

Like other Mexican-American writers, Anaya creates a distinctive cultural ambience primarily through the use of folklore. (The language of Bless Me, Ultima, except for an occasional word or phrase, is conventional English.) The narrator, Antonio, refers frequently to cuentos of witchcraft and to legends of la llorona and the Virgin of Guadalupe that he hears throughout his childhood. He describes in great detail Ultima's healing powers which derive from traditional Mexican folk medicine. Occasionally, Anaya modifies conventional folk traditions or creates a kind of pseudo-folklore for his fictional purposes. For example, the owl is usually a symbol of evil in Mexican folklore, the nagual (companion) of witches. But in Anaya's work, the owl is the guardian spirit of Ultima. The effect is to dramatize Ultima's powers and the air of mystery surrounding her, for although she exercises her magic primarily for the good of the community, she is quite capable of pronouncing curses on her enemies. Anaya also creates the "legend," of the Golden Carp, a symbol of benevolent pantheism reminiscent of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. Anaya virtually immerses Antonio in oral tradition, by way of suggesting that for the Chicano, folklore is the foundation of a cultural identity. Antonio learns as much. "Ultima told me the stories and legends of my ancestors," he explains. "From her I learned the glory and the tragedy of the history of my people, and I came to understand how that history stirred in my blood."

Bless Me, Ultima is a deeply moving work of genuine excellence, certainly one of the finest Mexican-American novels published to date. Not the least of Anaya's accomplishments is his rejection of the contrived Hispanicism that enervated the work of earlier New Mexican writers. Anaya portrays the mestizo element of New Mexican culture positively; indeed, he attributes Ultima's power precisely to her mastery of both Spanish and Indian traditions.

The heyday of Quinto Sol was quite brief; despite the successful promotion of writers such as Montoya, Rivera, Hinojosa, and Anaya, by the early 1970s Quinto Sol was itself splintering and other publishing houses were springing up to challenge its preeminence in Mexican-American literature. But Quinto Sol had lavishly accomplished its goal of stimulating Mexican-American literary activity and pushing it along various diverse trajectories. Just how diverse Mexican-American literature had quickly become is exemplified by the appearance of two remarkable books by Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People.

Acosta is doubtless the most bizarre and fascinating figure to emerge on the Mexican-American literary scene since the 1960s. A friend of Hunter Thompson, Acosta had appeared in Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as Dr. Gonzo, a three-hundred-pound "Samoan" lawyer with a drug appetite to match his girth. Encouraged by Thompson, Acosta became an author himself and brought out his Autobiography in 1972. As he tells it, Acosta's personal history is quite extraordinary. Raised in the racist rural community of Riverbank, California, Acosta picks peaches as a child and recalls the flour sacks his mother used to make dresses, shirts, and curtains. He begins to call himself "Brown Buffalo" for his complexion and obesity and because the buffalo is "the animal that everyone slaughtered." After high school, Acosta launches himself into a remarkable series of careers: clarinetist in an Air Force band, Baptist missionary in Panama, copy editor for a San Francisco newspaper and, finally, poverty lawyer in Oakland. In this last occupation, Acosta is miserable, frustrated by an endless procession of poor blacks and Mexican-Americans who seek divorces, restraining orders against brutal husbands, and relief from angry creditors. His personal life is equally wretched: he is lonely, drinks heavily, and experiments with every variety of drug. At the root of his troubles is a lack of self-identity. Acosta has forgotten virtually all his Spanish and knows few Mexican-Americans intimately. In 1968, he begins to hear reports of "Chicano" activism in Los Angeles. Acosta's Autobiography closes with his move to Los Angeles, "the home of the biggest herd of brown buffaloes in the world."

The Revolt of the Cockroach People treats Acosta's involvement in various Chicano political activities from 1968 to 1971. It is an exceptional book for several reasons. In the first place, it is one of a very few works by Mexican-Americans with Los Angeles settings. Secondly, Cockroach People is rendered in Acosta's version of Hunter Thompson's "Gonzo" journalism, a literary technique which requires the author's participation in the very events he is recording and which eschews revision in favor of retaining spontaneity and immediacy. Gonzo journalism resembles stream of consciousness fiction: rambling, highly personal and even idiosyncratic, sometimes overheated. The Revolt of the Cockroach People resembles a novel more closely than a journalistic narrative. Although Acosta focuses on actual events, his presentation is sensational, impressionistic and manipulative; he never hesitates to rearrange history for dramatic effect. His style is utterly consistent with his image of Los Angeles as chaotic, schizophrenic, and violent–"the most detestable city on earth."

Acosta's Los Angeles is not the Hollywood, Beverly Hills, or Malibu of popular culture but the sprawling eastside barrios. Mexican-American Los Angeles is a city apart, not merely a collection of neighborhoods, but a distinctive, embattled community with its own language, culture, and longfestering resentments. Acosta chronicles this neglected community as it is pushed inexorably towards its flashpoint. As Acosta begins to comprehend the circumstances of Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles, he discards his notion of them as buffaloes and comes to regard them instead as cockroaches, an image from a traditional Mexican song that captures the extent of their degradation. Cockroach people live in squalor and are reviled by those with higher economic and social status. As the lowest of life forms, they are exterminated even more casually than buffaloes. For Acosta, the most notable human cockroach is the vato loco (crazy dude), an embodiment of destructiveness and moral anarchy and the Mexican-American community's unwilling contribution to the insanity of Los Angeles.

Acosta's participation in various Mexican-American civil rights activities leads only to disillusionment, for the social and political structure of Los Angeles seems contrived to hold Mexican-Americans in a perpetual state of peonage. The mayor, the police chief, the legal system, even the Catholic Church conspire to oppress Acosta's people. The final scenes of Cockroach People are apocalyptic. Whittier Boulevard, the main thoroughfare of East Los Angeles, is burning. Telephone lines are cut, windows are broken, cars are overturned and smoking. Acosta thinks of Saigon and Haiphong during the worst moments of the Vietnam War.

Ultimately, Acosta's Los Angeles is a city cursed by its subjugation of Mexican-Americans and its willful destruction of their culture. The city's schizophrenia is rooted in its rejection of its Mexican soul. Without a real past, Los Angeles constantly reinvents itself, trying unsuccessfully to fill its historical vacuum. But not until Los Angeles accepts its Mexicanness will it be at peace with itself.

The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People stand as the most vehement Mexican-American literary denunciation of American culture to appear in the activist period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Acosta encounters bigotry, corruption, and decadence everywhere he turns in the United States. Having been made to feel shame about his heritage, Acosta lacks a stabilizing ethnic consciousness. In Los Angeles he tries desperately to recover his cultural identity but it is too late. Acosta drifts from one group or cause to another, but always toward a state of rootlessness. He sees himself as one of the casualties of American life, lonely, disoriented, and tormented.

Acosta seems not only to have purged recent Mexican-American literature of much of its rage but, simultaneously, to have indicated a continuing trend toward introspection and autobiographical modes of expression. To the qualities of introspection and autobiographical expression, one might add a third feature to denote recent Mexican-American writing: elegy. As Juan Bruce-Novoa has argued, elegy, as applied to Mexican-American writing, provides for the consideration not only of tragedy–of the death of an individual, a cultural group, or a body of tradition–but of some transcendent principle that makes life tolerable and meaningful.

For Gary Soto, probably the most acclaimed of contemporary Mexican-American poets, the "transcendent principle" has been imagination. In his four volumes, Soto presents an array of characters who use their imaginations to lift themselves, however momentarily, out of squalor and oppression. In a group of poems set near the Mexican city of Taxco, Soto introduces Manuel Zaragoza, a tavern keeper all but destroyed by his wife's death during pregnancy. Grief follows him "perched like a bird on his shoulder" and so he passes his nights at his cantina, drinking and playing childish games. During the day, he walks the streets of his village "perplexed like a priest," watching burros "sniffing their own dung." Manuel finds relief by escaping into a world of marvelous fantasies, some of which he offers as real events. He dreams of owning a circus, complete with nude dancers and a talking rooster. In "The Tale of Sunlight," Manuel tells of a beam of sunlight which, without any source, brightens his tavern. Eventually the beam settles on a wall and vaporizes any object that touches it. Zaragoza, by now thoroughly liberated from the banalities of conventional existence, offers a stub of a finger as evidence of the beam's magical powers. In "The Space," Manuel is reclining in a hammock enjoying a world he has largely made over:

I say it is enough
To be where the smells
Of creatures
Braid like rope
And to know if
The grass's rustle
Is only a lizard passing.
It is enough, brother,
Listening to a bird coo
A leash of parables,
Keeping an eye
On the moon,
The space
Between cork trees
Where the sun first appears.

Like Tomás Rivera, Soto has written compassionately and without sentimentality about Mexican-American farm workers who labor far removed from public concern and who learn that vindication must come from within themselves. In the title section of The Elements of San Joaquin, Soto contrasts the beauty of the California farmlands with the misery of the farm workers. In the poem "Field," a farm worker laments: "Already I am becoming the valley / A soil that sprouts nothing / For any of us." The American landscape, so much revered in our national literature and particularly that of the West, is for the farm worker only the arena of his discontent. The elements of nature are either indifferent or genuinely hostile. The sun is a killer, and fog not only obscures man's activities but the very fact of his existence. And when the fog lifts, there is the dust, one of Soto's recurrent symbols. In a prosaic sense, it vivifies the dirtiness of contemporary life but it also suggests the eventual disintegration of living matter: "The wind strokes / The skulls and spines of cattle / To white dust, to nothing. . . ."

Soto's poetry embodies many of the best qualities of contemporary Mexican-American writing. It moves easily across national boundaries to mark the lines of continuity between Mexican-Americans and Mexicans and to portray man's essential dignity. Soto's characters are brilliantly individualized yet recognize their need to participate in a cultural community. From his first volume to his latest, Soto's ethnic consciousness has deepened in wisdom and humor. Here is "Black Hair," the title poem of his latest collection:

At eight I was brilliant with my body.
In July, that ring of heat
We all jumped through, I sat in the bleachers
of Romain Playground, in the lengthening
Shade that rose from our dirty feet.
The game before us was more than baseball.
It was a figure–Hector Moreno
Quick and hard with turned muscles,
His crouch the one I assumed before an altar
Of worn baseball cards, in my room.
I came here because I was Mexican, a stick
Of brown light in love with those
Who could do it–the triple and hard slide,
The gloves eating balls into double plays.
What could I do with 50 pounds, my shyness,
My black torch of hair about to go out?
Father was dead, his face no longer
Hanging over the table or our sleep,
And mother was the terror of mouths
Twisting hurt by butter knives.
In the bleachers I was brilliant with my body,
Waving players in and stomping my feet,
Growing sweaty in the presence of white shirts.
I chewed sunflower seeds. I drank water
And bit my arm through the late innings.
When Hector lined balls into deep
Center, in my mind I rounded the bases
With him, my face flared, my hair lifting
Beautifully, because we were coming home
To the arms of brown people.

Apart from its moving affection for "brown people," "Black Hair" is notable for Soto's willingness to straightforwardly address his frailty: his shyness, his meager 50 pounds, his "black torch of hair, about to go out." This quality of self-examination and revelation, so prevalent in current Mexican-American poetry, manifests itself with particular force in the work of various women poets who must deal not only with the general maladies of American life but sexism within and outside their own ethnic culture. Lorna Dee Cervantes, in her excellent collection Emplumada, presents her readers with experiences of staggering oppressiveness and pain. "Uncle's First Rabbit" recounts several experiences of wife-beating including one that results in the premature birth and death of an infant. Male violence against women is one of the sordid facts of Cervantes's poetic world. In other poems, she describes an assault in a vacant lot, an actual rape, another incident of wife-beating, and what seems to be an attempted incestuous attack. In the face of such brutality, women learn to rely on themselves and other women. In "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway," Cervantes describes a "woman family" featuring a grandmother toughened by "living twenty-five years / with a man who tried to kill her." Not just sexism but bigotry induces the poet's alienation. "I am marked by the color of my skin," she observes at one point; at a writers' conference in Port Townsend, Washington, she is made to feel uncomfortable about her ethnicity and thus remarks simply, "I don't belong this far north."

In a prefatory note, Cervantes indicates the double meaning of her volume's title. "Emplumada" means "feathered; in a plumage, as in after molting" while the embedded word "plumada" refers to a flourish of a pen. The title is well chosen because the volume chronicles the poet's "molting" of longstanding hatreds and fears and her rebirth into love and understanding. The instrument of this transformation is the pen that she flourishes with such gratifying results. Like many of the best current Mexican-American poets, Cervantes writes with clarity and economy, drawing her images from ordinary life. Her accomplishment is to have confronted ethnic prejudice and machismo, both Anglo-and Mexican-American varieties, directly, and to have emerged from the experience strengthened and ennobled.

The most notable feature of current Mexican-American writing is its sheer diversity, a characteristic easily demonstrated in a necessarily brief discussion of four recent and important works. Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, probably the most widely discussed work by a Mexican-American, is an autobiography that chronicles an individual's experience of assimilation and inevitable estrangement from his family and traditional culture. It is also perhaps the most widely praised volume of prose by a Mexican-American. Arturo Islas's The Rain God, on the other hand, is an autobiographical novel which suggests that love and the sharing of a common culture can hold a family together despite the convulsions of Americanization. The Rain God is a richly textured and moving work which expertly utilizes the West Texas desert borderlands as a symbolic background for action. In poetry, Luis Omar Salinas's recent Darkness Under the Trees / Walking Behind the Spanish reveals not only immense talent but range. Salinas treats personal matters, esthetic questions, and general issues of ethnic and historical consciousness. The collection is simply a brilliant performance. A most welcome recent development has been the growing influence and presence of women writers. In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros continues the estampa tradition but this time to describe the urban experiences of a Mexican-American family from a Chicana/feminist perspective. What all this diversity indicates, of course, is a maturation. Mexican-American writers no longer feel bound to particular themes, forms, or ideologies.

Ultimately, the importance of Mexican-American literature derives from its evocation and preservation of a distinctive culture which has a shaping influence on the character of large regions of the United States. Generally, high school and college textbooks portray the American experience as an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, with the English colonists and their descendants pushing majestically westward from Massachusetts and Virginia to civilize a continent. This view, of course, is false and particularly so in the Southwest, where the signs of Mexican and Mexican-American culture cannot be easily ignored. Mexican-American literature is the record of that presence. Pasamos por aquí.

RAYMUND A. PAREDES, University of California, Los Angeles

Selected Bibliography
Fiction
Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima. Berkeley: Quinto Sol, 1972.
Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1983.
Hinojosa, Rolando. Estampas del valle y otras obras. Berkeley: Quinto Sol, 1973.
. Generaciones y semblanzas. Berkeley: Editorial Justa, 1977.
. The Valley. Ypsilanti, Michigan: Bilingual Press, 1983.
Islas, Arturo. The Rain God. Palo Alto: Alexandrian Press, 1984.
Rivera, Tomás. ". . . y no se lo tragó la tierra." Berkeley: Quinto Sol, 1971.
Autobiography
Acosta, Oscar Zeta. The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1972.
. The Revolt of the Cockroach People. San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1973.
Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory. Boston: David Godine, 1982.
Poetry
Cervantes, Lorna Dee. Emplumada. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.
Salinas, Luis Omar. Darkness Under the Trees / Walking Behind the Spanish. Berkeley: University of California Chicano Studies Library, 1982.
Soto, Gary. The Elements of San Joaquin. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977.
. The Tale of Sunlight. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978.
. Where Swallows Work Hard. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.
. Black Hair. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984.
Drama
Valdez, Luis. Actos. San Juan Bautista, Ca.: Centro Campesino Cultural, 1971.
Anthologies
Cárdenas de Dwyer, Carlota, ed. Chicano Voices. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.
Kanellos, Nicolas, ed. A Decade of Hispanic Literature: An Anniversary Anthology. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1982.
Romano, Octavia, ed. El Espejo/The Mirror. Berkeley: Quinto Sol, 1969. Romano, Octavia, and Herminio Rios, eds. El Espejo/The Mirror, revised edition. Berkeley: Quinto Sol, 1972.
Vigil, Evangelina, ed. Woman of Her Word: Hispanic Women Write. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1983.
Critical Studies and Bibliographies
Bruce-Novoa, Juan. Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980. Informative and extensive interviews with leading Mexican-American writers, including Rivera and Hinojosa.
. Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. The first book-length study of contemporary Chicano poetry with an emphasis on formal and esthetic qualities.
Eger, Ernestina N. A Bibliography of Criticism of Contemporary Chicano Literature. Berkeley: University of California Chicano Studies Library, 1982. The most useful guide to critical studies on Chicano literature available.
Huerta, Jorge A. Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms. Ypsilanti, Michigan: Bilingual Press, 1982. An overview of recent Chicano drama, especially useful for its history of the Teatro Campesino.
Shirley, Carl. "A Contemporary Fluorescence of Chicano Literature." Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, 1984. An excellent survey of Mexican-American writing today.
Tatum, Charles M. Chicano Literature. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982. An insightful one-volume study of the history of Chicano writing, from the nineteenth century to the present.

[Contents] [Index]