THE ULTRAVIOLET SKY

Written by Alma Luz Villanueva

Publication: 1988, Bilingual Press; 1988, Anchor Books, Doubleday
379 pages
ISBN: 0-385-42014-5

Review by
Thelma T. Reyna

Book Review #9 in the
PIONEER AMERICAN LATINA AUTHORS SERIES

_________________________________________________________________________________

From the outset, defiance runs through this book—not like a thread, but like a surging river. It is a stubborn defiance, rock-hard and take-no-prisoners style. It’s also vulnerable, collapsing in tears and castigations. It’s a defiance that stabs us with discomfort, that makes us see ourselves in painful recognition, or that makes us weep to remember the times we wrestled with those demons, too. It is a defiance built of granite and wolves, built of clouds and angels. But it is a defiance that has no choice but to exist.

What else could we expect of Alma Luz Villanueva, one of the first prominent Latina feminist authors in the U.S.? A poet, essayist, and short fiction writer as well as a novelist, Villanueva has devoted her artistic life to exploring and exposing the ugly terrain of misogyny, of misguided oppression and abuse of women, of the destruction of our planet by militaristic patriarchies, the violence of war, and the obliteration of spirituality that springs from connection to natural life and the forces of the earth. Villanueva is the voice of the voiceless, and defiance in the face of destructive forces is her weapon.

Rosa, the Novel’s Hero, and Her Battles

When we first meet Rosa Luján, we recognize her immediately as a woman who will not be subjugated. She’s arguing bitterly with her husband Julio regarding their infant daughter, car repairs, schedules, and typical trivia that unhappy couples often quarrel about. The first few dozen pages of the novel are saturated with her fury and defiance against Julio’s attempts to impose his will upon her. Her stubborn resistance is, in fact, too heavy for a contemporary reader, with Rosa baring her teeth like an animal, clutching a knife, threatening her reclining husband with a sharp fireplace poker, and risking her safety by sleeping outdoors late at night when even she realizes it’s dangerous. Whatever she can do to resist Julio, to make him squirm, to show him that he doesn’t own her, she does. In the beginning, being sympathetic toward Rosa is a bit difficult. The reader wonders if she can tone it down, if she can be less domineering herself, less preachy about female oppression and machismo, and if she can get that gigantic chip off her shoulder.

But then we learn more about this 35-year-old artist, teacher, and mother of a teenage son. We learn that she was abandoned by her mother as a young child and raised by an aunt and grandmother. We learn that Rosa became pregnant as a young teen, that she is half-German and regrets this heritage because of what Germans did to humanity, that she raised her son Sean alone and has struggled mightily to survive. All she has known is barriers and male expectations that she bow down to stereotypical roles and that she—especially as a Latina—must accept her status in life. We see how her aunt and grandmother were trapped thus in servitude to the dominant men in their lives.

Rosa describes the “Mexican Man,” or  “M.M.,” (p. 243) as she sometimes jokingly refers to him, an archetype she has vowed never to marry: “He’s the man I’ve seen women make the endless piles of tortillas for, as he grows fat and stupid while his brain shrinks to fit his narrow mind that dictates boys are better than girls, boys become men, girls become wives, men have moments of  freedom, release, women count the tortillas and the children. Men have affairs, women become whores. Puta. La Puta. You know, that word used to send shivers down my spine.” Rosa tells her husband about M.M. and why she fights for her freedom and independence. Julio is no M.M., but he often seethes against her stubbornness to do things as her soul dictates, such as when she leaves him to go live alone in the mountains.

The Mountains and Their Symbolism

Rosa’s spirituality and connectedness to nature, to Earth, is a theme throughout this book. She is part Yaqui and also knows about the history of the ancient Mexican people: their gods and goddesses, especially “the infinite, ever-present Quetzalpetlatl,” whom she often invokes. Rosa’s dreams elucidate many of her struggles, with goddesses and animals often the source of revelations for her waking life. It is in a dream that Rosa “sees” a cabin in a remote part of the mountains six hours away, surrounded by wolves and other creatures. Rosa seeks that mountain, that cabin, and finds it.

She realizes that she must sever all tethers to status quo: leave Julio, leave the city, leave the trappings of civilization to find her inner core, to establish her independence fully, to allow her art to flourish unbounded. She wants this need to be understood and accepted by people close to her—her husband, son, friends—and is disappointed when their concerns for her safety and their ties to stereotypes trump their embracing of her journey. But her power struggles with Julio, his jealous possessiveness of her, especially regarding her platonic male friends, overwhelms her spirit, and she buys the cabin and moves alone to the mountain.

She wonders: “If he loves me, why does he continue to insist that I relent and relent and relent. As though that would be proof that I love him. This is why people kill each other….This is why nations war.” (p. 286) But Julio—a Vietnam War veteran often tormented by his experiences, a Nativist with Mayan roots, and a polished professional—is yet too bound by his culture to understand Rosa’s rebellion and support her quest. Though he, as well as Sean and Rosa’s friends, visit her at the cabin, maintaining their ties to her, each of their visits is a battle to make Rosa return home. Rosa feels alone and fights even harder to prove them wrong.

Rosa’s Evolution

Some of the most important events in Rosa’s evolution as an independent human being occur in the mountains: giving birth to her and Julio’s unplanned baby, raising her alone, having her first extramarital affair after she and Julio agreed to an open marriage while Rosa decides whether or not to return to him. But most important: Rosa’s art flourishes, and the title of the novel comes into play: Rosa’s most cherished painting, one in which the exact color of a lilac sky long eluded her, is completed, with “an ultraviolet sky.” In a flash of insight, Rosa says: “That’s the color of the lilac sky. That’s why I can’t see it. I’ll never be able to see it. I can only witness what it does. The way it births us, the way it kills us…the ultraviolet light, like love.” (p. 378)

One particular incident captures Rosa’s soul and view of life. While her neighbor and son are visiting her one day, an immense hawk accidentally flies against a window of her cabin. Stunned, the hawk lies on the ground, and Rosa instinctively goes toward it. Both men shout at her to stop, saying the hawk’s talons will rip her apart. Still, Rosa slowly picks up the hawk, its talons jabbing against her palms, and she speaks soothingly to it, carrying it gently to a hollowed stump, where the hawk slowly gathers itself, looks at Rosa, and flies away. Later, Rosa admits she had been afraid, “but I had to pick him up anyway.” (p. 368) Rosa’s life has been a continuous battle against her own fears as well as dangers, but it is a fight she faces, with a faith in the life forces of nature and her own instincts.

The Importance of this Novel and Villanueva

Besides Julio and Sean, almost all the male characters in this book hew the line regarding the subjugation, overt or subtle, of women: the husbands and lovers of her friends, the men who live in the remote mountains near Rosa, and even the doctor charged with saving Rosa’s premature baby’s life and Rosa herself. Rosa therefore   has ample, recurrent confirmation of how women must fight for their identities and self-esteem. The female characters, with few exceptions, are connected to one another through their love of nature, of being together in natural elements, and believing in their dreams.

The sociopolitical flailings against male chauvinism in this book thus sound overwrought at times. But readers must read Villanueva’s words in their historical context: The modern American feminist movement was relatively young, and the cultural shifts that have enabled many attitudinal and social changes regarding women at this point were hardly in sight in 1988. Also, Latinas openly embraced the feminist movement later than their non-Latina sisters, so the issues Rosa faces were raw and hurtful ones when this book was published. A winner of the prestigious American Book Award in 1989, The Ultraviolet Sky is still considered significant in feminist fiction and is often deemed Villanueva’s most popular work.

Alma Luz Villanueva’s focus in almost all her writings has been giving women a voice, shining the spotlight on “poverty, the mistreatment of women…painful issues in women’s lives, such as drug abuse, rape, incest, prostitution, and murder.” (p. 1607, Norton Anthology of Latino Literature) Having had a traumatic childhood and highly difficult, turbulent adolescence herself, Villanueva often interweaves autobiographical elements into her poems, stories, and novels. She writes from the heart because her heart has experienced much of what she describes.

Villanueva’s body of work includes seven collections of poetry, with her most recent, Soft Chaos, published in 2008; one short story collection, Weeping Woman: La Llorona and Other Stories (1994); and three novels, with The Ultraviolet Sky being her first. Prior to this award-winning book, Villanueva, first and foremost a poet, had published four of her poetry books. Testimony to the pre-eminence of poetry in Villanueva’s arsenal of talents is the poetic language that is often interwoven into the descriptions in The Ultraviolet Sky. When we read this novel, we know we are in the presence of a mighty poetic soul.
Alma Luz Villanueva has taught in various colleges and universities, the latest one being Antioch University in Los Angeles. Villanueva has won numerous other literary awards, including the PEN Oakland fiction award; the Latino Literature Prize, New York; the Best American Poetry Award; and the 1976-1977 Chicano/Latino Literary Prize. Her website is http://www.almaluzvillanueva.com/

__________________________________________________________

Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D. is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009), which has won four national awards. Her third book, a poetry chapbook titled Hearts in Common, will be issued in June 2013. It was a semi-finalist in a national poetry competition. Her other books include Breath & Bone (2011),  another award-winning poetry chapbook; and the forthcoming Life & Other Important Things (Spring 2013), a collection of mini-essays and sociopolitical commentary excerpted from her published writings of the past 30+ years. Dr. Reyna has served as an adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles, and at California Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her website is www.ThelmaReyna.com.

The Mixquiahuala Letters

Written by Ana Castillo

Publication: 1986, Bilingual Press
[Republished by Doubleday/Anchor Books in 1992]
138 pages
ISBN: 0-385-42013-7

Reviewed by Thelma T. Reyna

BOOK REVIEW #8 in the
PIONEER AMERICAN LATINA AUTHORS

_______________________________________________________________________

ANA CASTILLO is one of those rare authors who makes a name for herself across genres. She has published well-received poetry, short stories, essays, novels, a play, a children’s book, and a memoir. She defies categorization primarily because of the high quality of her work, with admirers in each genre claiming her for their category above all others.

But the truth is, despite poetry being her first love—with her first publication being a collection of her poems in 1977—Castillo’s fame has been cemented more by  her novels than by any other work she has done. She was asked by an interviewer once how she saw herself: “As a fiction writer who also writes poems? A novelist or a short story writer?…an essayist who writes plays?” She replied simply: “Writer.” Yet it was her first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters, which catapulted her onto the literary radar. It received the prestigious American Book Award in 1987 and set Castillo on her path to fame.

The book is an epistolary novel (one told through letters), with the letters all written by one of its two protagonists. The letter-writer, Teresa, is a poet, an American Latina of Mayan descent, a young woman accustomed to discrimination based on her dark skin, slanted eyes, and humble roots. The recipient of her letters is Alicia, a pale, evanescent woman of mixed heritage, with Spanish gypsy blood in her, but basically considered an Anglo from a privileged background. Alicia is an artist who loses herself in her watercolors, other artwork, numerous doomed love affairs, and long stretches of silence and withdrawal in which she sometimes appears disembodied.

Plot and Characters

The two women are 20 years old when they meet in Mexico City in a summer cultural study program sponsored by an American group. The six women in the program are basically “California blonds and eastern WASP’s, instructors who didn’t speak Spanish” (p. 24), so Teresa—with her “Indian marked face, fluent use of the language, undeniably Spanish name” (p. 25)—soon absconds and chooses to absorb and learn Mexico on her own. Alicia, immediately attracted to Teresa’s earthiness, goes with her. The two vagabonds, low on cash but high on living life on their own terms, traverse Mexico, off the proverbial beaten path, to savor the rusticity and authenticity of the nation’s past and its unpredictable present.

Their encounters in that summer of wanderlust might prick the sensibilities of conservative readers, especially mothers, as the two young women are verbally and physically accosted, sexually harassed, almost raped, robbed, and humiliated. Yet Teresa and Alicia manage to hang on to their dignity, starting with a memorable weekend in Mixquiahuala, an ancient village of Toltec ruins, no street lighting, lamb barbecues, and pushy men who promise marriage in exchange for sex. The young women live meagerly among peasants and native women washing clothes in streams, fishermen battling elements, and a motley crew of men indistinguishable one from the other for their ingrained belief in female inferiority. Yet the elemental aspect of life in untouched nature, the kindness and generosity of strangers, the fluidity of time, the solitude and introspection that their journeying evokes, feed the women’s spirits sufficiently to keep them trekking despite hardships.

Teresa and Alicia return to their colleges and turbulent lives after that first summer, Teresa facing a disastrous marriage and Alicia a tormented love affair. Throughout the decade spanned by The Mixquiahuala Letters, the women stay in contact with one another as they battle societal expectations they cannot accept and struggle to find a balance between what’s in their hearts and what the world dictates they must be. Teresa describes it thus:

“I was no longer prepared to face a mundane life of need and resentment, accept monogamous commitments and honor patriarchal traditions, and wanted to be rid of the husband’s guiding hand, holidays with family and in-laws, led by a contradicting God, society, road and street signs, and, most of all, my poverty.” (pp. 28-29)

The novel is not linear. Though the letters are presented in a semblance of chronology, from 1-40, they swoop in and out of time, taking the women from Mexico to Chicago to California and New York, and back to all these places again, from lover to lover, from crisis to crisis, with highs and lows. The women travel to Mexico again a year after their first trek, with Mexico seemingly their touchstone as to who they really are, and how they are fully authentic with one another only in that ancient land, though Mexico is a “country where relationships were never clear and straightforward but a tangle of contradictions and hypocrisies.” (p. 60) Ultimately, these contradictions color these women’s friendship as well.

The women are constant, though antithetical to one another. They complement one another: the yin and yang, strength and frailty, with Teresa strong, defiant, coarse, courageous; and Alicia “mystical….the ocean, immense and horizontal, your hair the tide that came in to meet the shore,” as Teresa described her. (p. 27) It is a friendship deeper than marriage, stronger than blood, yet more painful than star-crossed lovers. Teresa and Alicia are an odd couple embodying the dynamic tension that prevails, ironically, even in a relationship of equals.

Themes and Historical Significance of the Book

The American feminist movement was still toddling when this book was published in 1986. Though readers today, especially Latinas, might feel that the themes of male oppression and suffocating Mexican traditions are passé, we must keep two things in mind: (1) oppression still exists, and (2) it’s a matter of degree. When Castillo’s book emerged, the issues the author railed against were more immediate and raw. Still, we are sometimes amazed at the relevance today of Castillo’s comments in her book, such as:

“When a woman entered the threshold of intimacy with a man [marriage], she left the companions of her sex without looking back. Her needs had to be sustained by him. If not, she was to keep her emptiness to herself.” (p. 35)

“Love…describes in one syllable all the humiliation that one is born to and pressed upon to surrender to a man.” (p. 117)

“I had left [my husband] because I thought I was fighting a society in which men and women entangled their relationships with untruths.” (p. 133)

Throughout the novel, Teresa and Alicia, but especially Teresa, fight to maintain their humanity, their uniqueness as women, apart from men in their lives. Teresa aborts her baby rather than be under the thumb of her oppressive lover and risk never being rid of him. Alicia’s resistance to the parasitic clinging of another lover ends with his suicide. Both women are traumatized by these events, but the episodes were inevitable in the toxic ambience of their relationships. When this book was published, Castillo was hailed as a feminist, and her book continues to be read in women’s studies classes throughout the U.S.

Castillo’s Inspiration and Tribute to “the Master”

The book was inspired by the brilliant Argentinian author, Julio Cortázar, who wrote the 1963 “interactive novel” Rayuela (Hopscotch), an experimental  500+ page masterpiece whose chapters and sections can be read in different sequences for different effects and interpretations. Cortázar’s book was a tour de force, with its integration of stream of consciousness, philosophy, music, art, politics, and existential threads questioning “the conundrum of consciousness,” as one reviewer has called it. Cortázar’s cast of characters spanned two continents, with most of the interactions set in Paris and Buenos Aires. It is often considered an intellectually heavy, pioneering novel.

Castillo’s novel, on the other hand, is more modest in scope. It centers primarily on the two women, and their “conundrum” is one of sexual/gender identity amidst misogyny and social barriers. Teresa and Alicia are predictable in the traps they fall into: pushing back against machismo, yet succumbing again and again to the same brand of male—entitled, arrogant, dismissive toward women. One wonders when each woman will learn from past errors and make better choices. But perhaps Castillo’s message in 1986 was that there are no men available outside this chauvinistic mold.

At times, Castillo’s epistolary structure is too contrived, too stilted to be believable, and some letters, such as Letter 30, interminably recounts the meeting between Alicia and her last lover, something which the letter’s recipient (Alicia) of course knew already. Serving as the driver of the novel’s plot, the letters must, of course, provide details and conversations. Sometimes this seems authentic (e.g., Letter 39), primarily when Teresa, the letter-writer, focuses on her own events rather than recounting what Alicia had experienced.

Like Hopscotch, Castillo’s novel can be read as the author organized the chapters, or the reader chooses to sequence the chapters, with the author’s suggestions. Another similarity in the two works is the vivid language. Castillo’s birth as a poet is clear in her descriptions, be they images of feelings, conflicts, events, or landscape. Her language is often powerful, as in Teresa’s description of her abortion: “I erupted, a volcano of hot wine, soft membrane, tissue, undefined nerves, sightless eyes, a miniscule, pounding heart, sightless flesh, all sucked out in torn, mutilated pieces. How long does death take? My drugged head was heavy and oblivious to time.”  (p. 114) Some of the letters are actually poems.

Castillo’s Legacy

Born in Chicago in 1953, Ana Castillo continues to be an active, highly influential writer. She lives in New Mexico after having resided in California, New York, and other states. She has published 7 novels, including the famed So Far From God (1993), and The Guardians (2007); a short story collection, Loverboys (1996); 6 volumes of poetry, including Women Are Not Roses (1984); a play, “Psst…I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor”; and a seminal nonfiction work, Massacre of the Dreamers (1994), which she created in lieu of a dissertation for her Ph.D. degree.

Of her future, Castillo said in an interview in 2008: “Our generation [the Baby Boomers] fought the establishment and saw us through extraordinary times. We most assuredly won’t simply go off into the good night without a whimper….So, as a writer, I continue to portray unprecedented literary characters, independent, fiery Latinas….I am also able to write cross-generationally.”

It is precisely these attributes that maintain Ana Castillo in the top tier of American authors today and will hopefully continue to do so for many more generations. Visit her website at www.anacastillo.com .

________________________________________________________________________

Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D. is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009), which has won four national awards. Her third book, a poetry chapbook titled Hearts in Common, will be issued in June 2013. It was a semi-finalist in a national poetry competition. Her other books include Breath & Bone (2011),  another award-winning poetry chapbook; and the forthcoming Life & Other Important Things (Spring 2013), a collection of mini-essays and sociopolitical commentary excerpted from her published writings of the past 30+ years. Dr. Reyna has served as an adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles, and at California Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her website is www.ThelmaReyna.com.

BORDERLANDS: LA FRONTERA, THE NEW MESTIZA

by Gloria Anzaldúa

Spinsters/Aunt Lute: 1987

203 pages

ISBN: 0-933216-25-4

Reviewed by Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.

Book Review #7 in the
PIONEER AMERICAN LATINA AUTHORS SERIES

_____________________________________________________

This book is written by a deeply wounded soul, an author whose pain and grief are almost palpable from start to finish. Borderlands: La Frontera, the New Mestiza is a powerful, highly polished collection of cultural and personal essays, mini-memoirs, and poetry that prick and prod our emotions and makes us think deeply on all the borders Anzaldúa deftly describes to us.

It is a dual story of traumatic conflict told in parallel tracks: the borderland assaults on Mexican and indigenous peoples by the White culture throughout recorded history; and the cultural assaults that Anzaldúa, as a woman of color, and as a representative of women generally, endured in establishing her autonomy and worth as a human being in a chauvinistic world.

Born in Texas just north of the Mexican border, Gloria Anzaldúa was a sixth-generation American, “a border woman,” as she calls herself, someone never comfortable with the American culture but who was instead keenly bonded to her identities as Indian, Mexican, española, Chicana, Tejana, and mestiza. Her usage of code-switching throughout this book, as well as entire portions written in Spanish, reinforces this cultural split—between American and Mexican, English and Spanish primarily—that consumed and defined Anzaldúa till the day she died in 2004 at the age of 61.

Borders and Their Pain

“I have been straddling that tejas-Mexican border, and others, all my life,” she says in the Preface to her book. “It’s not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions. Hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape.” Toward the end of the book, after we have seen the immensity of her cultural turbulence, she states in a poem: “To live in the Borderlands means you/…are carrying all [the] races on your back/ not knowing which side to turn to, run from;/….you are at home, a stranger,/…you are wounded, lost in action/ dead, fighting back” (p. 194).

Added to these complex mixtures of identities are Anzaldúa’s lesbianism and—according to some reports, bisexuality—as well as her staunch rejection of male dominance. Anzaldúa writes: “I made the choice to be queer (for some it is genetically inherent)” (p. 19, Anzaldua’s emphasis).” The book examines these sexual and gender conflicts at length. Anzaldúa’s poem, “Creature of Darkness,” describes the personal yet universal battles that rage inside her as a “deep place/ this underplace/ this grieving place/ getting heavier and heavier/ sleeping by day creeping out at night….I want not to think/ that stirs up the pain/ opens the wound” (p. 186).

A rebel since early childhood, Anzaldúa straddled symbolic borders even within her family, as she renounced expectations handed down through generations of women: that she do domestic chores instead of studying, that she marry and demur to her husband and males in general, that she live and work in Texas. Instead, she earned college degrees, remained single and childless, and became the first person in her family’s history “to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me” (p. 16). She lived life on her own terms, moving to California and the east coast, but paid dearly with rejection by her mother and others.

Racial Conflicts: Natives vs. Encroachers

Borderlands is heavy on history. It recounts how the ancient ancestors of Mexicans and Texans—the Cochise, Aztecs, and others—peopled the Southwest for centuries, only to have White “invaders” steal their lands, terrorize, expel and defeat the native peoples, and institute oppression that continues to this day. The border fences built by Whites between the United States and Mexico starkly symbolize the separation of races and relegation of Mexicans to undesirable, inferior status. Anzaldúa describes the border as “una herida abierta (an open wound) where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (p. 3).

The theft of lands is personal to Anzaldúa, since her own family and neighbors, who had owned ranches in the Rio Grande Valley for many generations, lost theirs to greedy White encroachers. Anzaldúa decries the gringos’ “fiction of white superiority” (p. 7) and recounts how her people were “jerked out by the roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history” (p. 8). In the poem, “We Call Them Greasers” (p. 134), she describes the brutal rape of a Mexican tejano rancher’s wife by a White man who stole the ranch, assaulted the woman in front of her husband, brutally killed her, then lynched her husband.

Anzaldúa’s clear-eyed but mournful retelling of her antecedents’ history represents a deep cultural trauma to her and the Tejanos, who have never recovered their sense of belonging in their own ancestral lands. Her inability to identify as “American” is unquestionably linked to this. In the poem “Don’t Give In, Chicanita,” Anzaldúa says: “yes, they’ve taken our lands./ Not even the cemetery is ours now…./ where they buried your great-great-grandfather./ Hard times like fodder we carry/ with curved backs we walk…./ But they will never take [our] pride/ or our Indian woman’s spirit” (p. 202). The author’s voice is grieving but defiant.

Being “Queer,” and Other Inner Struggles

Anzaldúa’s exploration of gender and the subjugation of women may seem like a tired topic in the 21^st century; but in 1987, iniquities against women were more pronounced, and Latina voices writing against this were rare. The author discusses female archetypes familiar to Latinas—La Malinche, Coatlique, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and La Llorona—and she lashes out against being boxed into any of these or any other stereotypes by chauvinistic expectations of men and Mexican tradition.

Anzaldúa also discusses the loss of native spirituality among her people and others of color. She takes organized religion to task, especially the Catholic Church, as vehicles of oppression, primarily toward women, and as denouncers of any spirituality besides their own ideology. She also decries “machismo” as representing men’s fear of tenderness and their excuse to abuse and demean women. Mostly, however, Anzaldúa delves into her own fears of inadequacy, of not being “normal.”

Many other writers have explored these issues, as well as the ostracism of homosexuals and “others”—but hardly anyone has done this more eloquently, more passionately, and with greater poignancy and genuine pain than Anzaldúa does. She is a complex woman who lived these subjugations and marginalizations, beginning her life with medical and physical deformities, skin dark like an Indian’s, and culminating in her decision to be “queer” (lesbian).

The New Mestiza

The 25 years that have passed since this book’s publication have not diminished its relevance. This is a sad statement to make, but the issues Anzaldúa rails against are still raw and present, especially for contemporary women. In her lengthy discussion of “the new mestiza,” the author depicts this racially mixed woman (part Indian, part Hispanic), her hero and savior-to-be, thus:

“The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity….She learns to juggle cultures. She…operates in a pluralistic mode….The future depends on the breaking down of paradigms,…the straddling of two or more cultures. By creating a new mythos—that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave—la mestiza creates a new consciousness” (p. 80). This description sounds like the multi-tasking career woman of today.

The new mestiza, through centuries of cross-breeding, has the best of many different genes, is stronger, and thus better able to survive. Anzaldúa confers her surest bets for a more enlightened, progressive society on this Latina, who can effectively navigate different cultural environments and who “could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war” (p. 80).

Anzaldúa’s Place in Literary History

Better-known as the co-editor of the ground-breaking This Bridge Called My Back : Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), (with another pioneering Latina author, Cherrié Moraga, previously profiled in this series) Gloria Anzaldúa was one of the first feminist, lesbian Latina authors published in the 20^th century. This Bridge won the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award in 1986. Borderlands  was named one of the best 38 books in 1987 and one of the 100 Best Books of the Century by three  prominent literary organizations. Anzaldúa also won other awards for her literary accomplishments.

A university professor on the east and west coast, Anzaldúa influenced generations of young thinkers for over 30 years and contributed significantly to academic theories regarding Chicanos, feminism, homosexuality, racism, and multiculturalism, especially regarding mestizaje, or the state of thinking in dualistic rather than unitary terms due to mixed heritage. She was awarded a doctoral degree posthumously by the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2005.

____________________________________________

Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D. is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009, Outskirts Press), which has won four national awards. Her short stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and other non-fiction have been published in literary and academic journals, literature textbooks, anthologies, blogs, and regional media off and on since the 1970’s. Her first poetry chapbook, Breath & Bone (Finishing Line Press, 2011) was a semi-finalist in a national poetry chapbook competition. Dr. Reyna is an adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. Her website is www.ThelmaReyna.com.

“Borders”

By Pat Mora

Year: 1986

Publisher: Arte Publico Press, Houston

Pages: 88

ISBN:  0-934770-57-3

Reviewed by Dr. Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.

Book Review #6 in the
PIONEER AMERICAN LATINA AUTHORS SERIES

__________________________________________________

Pat Mora’s iconic poetry book, Borders, sets its tone immediately, with the title poem placed alone just before the thematic sections of the book unwrap themselves. Mora makes a distinction between men’s and women’s communication right off the bat, citing a researcher who says, “…men and women may speak different languages that they assume are the same.”

Thus, the first border is laid down by Mora: the line separating how the sexes communicate. “So who can hear/ the words we speak/ you and I, like but unlike,/ and translate us to us/ side by side?” the poet asks. She establishes a framework of contiguous separations—borders—where “like” is “unlike,” and we are “similar but different,” existing “side by side,” but still needing translations for comprehension. She’s speaking about all of us, of course.

Her book goes on to evoke and explore borders large and small, known and unknown, old and new, faint and glaring. The poet draws on her lifetime of living on and near borders, beginning with her birth in El Paso, Texas, her home for most of her life before moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico. The granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, Mora has straddled the border between cultures and languages, has navigated the “like” and “unlike” for her entire life. As her book depicts, borders can be cruel or innocuous, but they ultimately reveal us to ourselves.

Cruel Borders of Hardship

Her book is filled with snapshots of people from all walks of life, people identifiable for their hardships as much as for their triumphs. Mora starts with the famous pioneering author and university leader, Tomás Rivera, whose hands “knew about the harvest,/ tasted the laborer’s sweat” but also “gathered books at city dumps…began to hold books gently, with affection.” Then, his hands “wrote the books/ he didn’t have, we didn’t have,” and hugged “the small brown hands” of children gathered round in admiration, “his hands whispering his secret/ learn, learn.” Rivera was the consummate cross-over, a migrant child of illiteracy who won prizes for his books and inspired legions of modern Latinos/as to demolish obstacles. Again, Mora establishes her framework with this, the second poem in her book, showing us how inhumane borders can be erased.

Other people, however, struggle with the limitations and discrimination imposed by borders. In “Immigrants,” Mora describes the lengths immigrant parents go through to “Americanize” their children, as they “wrap their babies in the American flag,/ feed them mashed hot dogs and apple pie.” Always, the fear of rejection and marginalization haunts them. In “Echoes,” the poet practically speaks through clenched teeth as she recounts how a party hostess insisted that her guests “just drop the cups and plates/ on the grass. My maid/ will pick them up.”

In “The Grateful Minority,” the poet describes Ofelia “scrubbing washbowls…/ mopping bathrooms for people/ who don’t even know your name.” The poem’s narrator cannot understand how Ofelia, as well as other “brown women,” can “whistle while/ you shine toilets, smile gratefully/ at dry rubber gloves, new uniforms,/ steady paychecks…content in your soapy solitude.” These women “bloom/ namelessly in harsh countries.” Perplexed, the poem’s speaker says: “I want to shake your secret/ from you. Why? How?”

The Subtle Borders of Life

But other borders—symbolic, emotional, or spiritual—are more subtle and often less painful. Section II (untitled) of Mora’s book speaks of family love, of the generations, and the passage of time. In “To My Son,” the border between childhood and adolescence is symbolized by the worn-down swing set, now sitting silent in the backyard, abandoned years ago. The border between doting affection and tough love is embodied in the word “no” repeated like a litany in “The Heaviest Word in Town.” The border between security and fear strikes the poet in “Waiting Room: Orthopedic Surgery,” as she waits nervously for her broken child to be made whole again.

Some borders transcend time, and Mora, particularly fond of elders, captures these poignantly. In “Pajarita,” the “small, gray Mexican bird/ brittle of bone, flutters at ninety/ through the large American cage/ all the comforts/ except youth.” The saintly grandmother straddles life and death as each day passes. In “Los Ancianos,” the poet describes an old couple holding hands as they traverse the plaza, “both slightly stooped, bodies returning to the land.” Walking the fine line between the present and eternity, “They know/ of moving through a crowd at their own pace.”

Our Individual and Collective Borders

Since borders are demarcations, there are always two sides, and marginalization is unavoidable. There is “us” and “them,” “their way” and “my way.” With this duality, prejudice and stereotypes become fact, and it takes concerted efforts on each person’s part to blur the borders traversing our lands and our interactions, so people can become simply one huge expanse of humanity.

Pat Mora’s heartfelt, spiritual book is a paean to how these borders imbue our lives, but how hurtful borders can be eased, or removed, when we embrace how everything is interwoven and we are, ultimately, one. Mora the poet is the sum total of her parts. As she has said in interviews, she cherishes her cultural heritage and often imbues her writing with it. Her writing is her attempt to facilitate communication and understanding among diverse peoples. She communicates with evident warmth, love, and compassion.

Known nationally for more than 30 books of poetry, essays, and children’s writings, Mora has received numerous literary awards, including the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literacy Award, the Southwest Book Award (4 times), Premio Aztlán Literature Award, and the Pellicer-Frost Bi-National Poetry Award. She has also received two honorary doctoral degrees and is best-known for instituting the nationally-celebrated event, “El día de los ninos/El día de los libros” (“The Day of the Children/The Day of Books”). Advocacy for children’s literacy is an abiding passion of Pat Mora. Her website is www.PatMora.com .

___________________________________________

Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D. is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009, Outskirts Press), which has won four national awards. Her short stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and other non-fiction have been published in literary and academic journals, literature textbooks, anthologies, blogs, and regional media off and on since the 1970’s. Her first poetry chapbook, Breath & Bone (Finishing Line Press, 2011) was a semi-finalist in a national poetry chapbook competition. Dr. Reyna is an adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. Her website is www.ThelmaReyna.com.

STAND UP AND BE HEARD!

Both U.S. presidential candidates have made a point of courting the Latino vote. Both have sent out their Latino/a surrogates to win voters over to their side, with President Obama deploying Eva Longoria, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, and singer Marc Anthony, among others. Challenger Mitt Romney has used the U.S. Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, effectively and also spotlighted New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez as a featured speaker at the GOP convention.

These are wise actions on the part of these presidential candidates and generally on the part of politicians who care about their political parties’ survival in the coming decades. The latest U.S. census and plenty of media reporters have made it amply clear that the Latino demographic is growing, and Latinos are poised to become America’s dominant ethnic group, or the majority, by 2050, representing almost one-third (30%) of the entire U.S. population. As of July 2011, the Latino population in America stood at 52 million, the largest ethnic minority group in our country.

PUTTING THESE NUMBERS IN PERSPECTIVE

How do these numbers break down? According to the Institute for Latino Studies, based at Notre Dame University, 1 in 6 residents in the U.S. today is Latino. In addition, 20% of all school children, one-fourth of all American babies, one-third of Catholics nationwide, and half of American Catholics under the age of 30 are Latinos. The Latino presence in demographic categories across the spectrum is undeniable. In fact, the American Hispanic population is the second-largest in the entire world, behind Mexico.

In sheer voting number potential, Latinos could wield significant clout in the presidential election next month. Both candidates would benefit immensely from the political support at the polls by Latinos. But there’s a major problem.

American Latinos are notorious for NOT voting.

WHY DON’T LATINOS VOTE?

By some estimates, only about 13% of eligible Latino voters in America actually go to the polls and cast their ballots. Throughout much of modern history, this has been the case, and several reasons are proffered for this.

• Latinos feel little investment in the political life of America, often feeling alienated and invisible. Language is a barrier for many, and lack of familiarity with political issues of the day serves as a deterrent for political engagement. Also, because many Latinos feel strong attachment to their Hispanic culture, the disconnect with American politics may be exacerbated.

• Latinos have not felt “invited to the table”: few Hispanics walk the halls of power in legislatures and board rooms across America, and especially in our national Congress, with the U.S. Senate being particularly devoid of Latinos/as. Few, if any, concerted efforts by power-brokers and other national leaders have been made to champion qualified Hispanic candidates, to groom them for leadership positions, and to provide them with resources to seek leadership roles, especially on the national stage. So, inevitably, Latinos often cannot identify with politicians in America.

• On voting day, Latinos might find themselves working long hours, or working second or third jobs to make financial ends meet, and thus cannot afford to take time off to vote.

• This current year, voter ID laws requiring photo identification will most likely dampen Latino voter turnout even more, since studies show that about 20% of eligible Latino voters have no photo ID, stemming from various reasons that include economic constraints.

There are undoubtedly other reasons for Latinos’ failure to vote, but the bottom line is this: Failure to vote nullifies the immense political influence Latinos could have in America, and the unfortunate conditions cited above will continue. The cycle repeats itself.

STANDING UP TO BE HEARD

The age-old adage, “There is power in numbers,” is still true. By standing on the sidelines on election day, the Latino people are diluting their potential to affect change in America, the potential to change how business is done, the potential to participate in our nation’s governance and advocate for greater inclusiveness in our democracy.

Staying away accomplishes nothing whatsoever and is, in fact, an impediment to improvement that sympathetic candidates might successfully undertake, if only they had our support at the polls. In 2012, especially, not showing up to vote can result in the election of a presidential candidate who has vowed to obstruct and prevent various laws and policies that would be highly beneficial to all Americans and especially to Latinos:

• Effective Immigration Reform

• Equal Pay for Women

• Women’s Access to Birth Control and Freedom to Determine their Own Reproductive Decisions

• Everyone’s Access to Healthcare and Better Educational Opportunities

• Access to Higher Education and the Economic and Social Mobility Opportunities a College Degree Provides, and

• The Pursuit of World Peace rather than the Military Militancy that takes so many Latino/a lives each year.

We need to stop and think: How valuable are these freedoms to us as individuals, families, and communities? Are we willing to fight for them, to advocate for them, and to show up and cast a ballot for them?

GETTING THE VOTE OUT

Not just for 2012, but continuing into the future, Latinos must take their right to vote very seriously and insure that they not only show up at the polls and cast ballots, but that they likewise involve every eligible Latino voter they know in exercising this inalienable right.

Social media has emerged as a powerful tool in influencing public opinion in the political sphere. Oftentimes, the “mainstream media,” or the “MSM,” as it’s widely referred to by citizen journalists, pundits, and the mainstream media itself (the well-known and established TV and radio news stations, talk shows, newspapers, major blogs, magazines, and news reporters) fails to report on certain news, or fails to adequately discuss important aspects of news events.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN OUR POLITICS

Recently, for example, President Obama’s supporters across America were dismayed at the MSM’s failure to hold challenger Mitt Romney accountable for the many factual inaccuracies he used in the first presidential debate in October. Despite the contention of allegedly nonpartisan “fact checkers” that Romney had told 28 untruths in a 38-minute period of the debate, for example, most of the MSM touted Romney’s “victory” in the debate rather than spend time discussing and analyzing Romney’s factual inaccuracies, which Obama supporters viewed as deceiving the American people.

Social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, helped to fill the MSM’s gap in reporting on this issue. Facebook and Twitter users lit up cyberspace with commentary, sharing of news links and blog links, and retweeting of information they deemed important enough to pass on. Engaging in Facebook “debates” via commentary with online “friends” and networkers has allowed Americans to weigh in on vital issues that the mainstream media might be ignoring or downplaying, for whatever reasons they perceive as justifiable.

Latinos must utilize social media to energize themselves and help mobilize other Latinos to vote. Discussing issues and the presidential candidates on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Tumblr, YouTube, MySpace, and the countless other social media venues can help us all to become informed, to participate in discussions and debates among our friends and networkers, to feel like we’re engaged in our country’s future…because we will be engaged if we take these steps.

And education is ongoing. If we Latinos educate ourselves on the issues, such as by reading high-quality, reputable newspapers online or at the local library if we don’t subscribe to them, we will be more ready and willing to go to the polls, to raise our voices in expressing our preferences for whom we want to lead us, and for what policies we believe are in our best interests as well as in the best interests of our nation.

As the years pass and our demographic grows, as the need for our inclusion in our nation’s destiny becomes more and more pronounced, we cannot and should not be mere observers, mere silent people on the margins. We need to take our own particular, individual destiny in hand and urge everyone around us to do likewise. We become invested in our destiny when we take that small but crucial step as citizens: voting.

Copyright 2012 by Dr. Thelma T. Reyna. This blog first appeared in Aurelio Flores’ website: www.PowerfulLatinas.com

__________________________________________________________________

 Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D. is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009, Outskirts Press), which has won four national awards. Her short stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and other non-fiction have been published in literary and academic journals, literature textbooks, anthologies, blogs, and regional media off and on since the 1970’s. Her first poetry chapbook, Breath & Bone (Finishing Line Press, 2011) was a semi-finalist in a national poetry chapbook competition. Dr. Reyna is an adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. She is a regular contributor of book reviews for Latinopia.com. Her website is www.ThelmaReyna.com.

House on Mango Street

By Sandra Cisneros

Vintage Books, 1984

[25^th Anniversary Edition, Vintage Books, 2009]

110 pages

ISBN: 978-0-679-73477-2

Reviewed by Dr. Thelma Reyna

Book Review #5 in the
PIONEER AMERICAN LATINA AUTHORS SERIES

_______________________________________________________

“La Sandra,” as Sandra Cisneros has sometimes been called by her fans, is perhaps the most famous American Latina writer alive today and possibly of all time. Her books have been translated internationally and are taught in grade schools and universities across our nation. As a multiple award-winner in her long, distinguished career, Cisneros has had a tremendous influence on the contemporary renaissance and evolution of Chicano/Latino literature in the United States.

Born in Chicago in 1954, Cisneros created stories and poems since elementary school. She knew early on that she wanted to be a writer and, as a young graduate student in the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the late 1970’s, already had a vision for her work: “to write stories that ignore borders between genres, between written and spoken, between highbrow literature and children’s nursery rhymes, between New York and the imaginary [Mexican] village of Macondo, between the U.S. and Mexico.”

This she wrote in her eloquent “Introduction” to the 25^th anniversary edition of her break-out classic, “The House on Mango Street.” And this—all of this—she accomplished beautifully in her book.

A Book ‘Between Genres’

This book is difficult to categorize. It’s called a novel, but it’s a collection of tiny vignettes, many of them barely a page long, most of them a snapshot of someone who lives on Mango Street, someone whom the book’s narrator, young Esperanza Cordero, knows directly or indirectly. Mango Street is in a poor section of Chicago (modeled after Bucktown pre-gentrification, according to Cisneros). The houses are cramped and rundown, with peeling paint and little or no yards. The children play on porches and streets, amidst a motley crew of poignant, disgusting, endearing, and enigmatic neighbors and storekeepers who run the gamut from drunken bums to nuns.

Unlike a novel, the book does not have a plot in the traditional sense. The thread that holds this book together is the recurrence of various characters—most of them Esperanza’s peers and family—from section to section, though many characters appear only once. Cisneros calls this “story cycles” and purposely chose “little stories…connected to each other.”  Each “chapter” (not traditional chapters either, but “a little story” instead) can be read as a stand-alone. The vignette may be as simple as a child’s description of clouds, or as complex as girls mocking a dying woman.

Cisneros states in her book’s Introduction that she wants to make her writing accessible to all, wants her readers to see themselves in her writing. “The House on Mango Street” is formatted to be read in one or two sittings and is something that Latinos/as can indeed relate to. It deals with issues at the heart of many adolescents’ evolution—gender roles, family dynamics, biculturalism, sexual identity, social responsibility, prejudice, domestic abuse, and poverty. The narrator, Esperanza, in the space of one year, learns about these issues either personally or through the suffering of friends and neighbors on Mango Street.

The Simple Complexity of People

Like a deft artist, Cisneros paints pictures of her characters in tight, economical brushstrokes. She says little about them in restrained, simple language, and picks unobtrusive details to show us their essence. Darius the fool chases girls with firecrackers and sees God in cloud formations. Marin sells Avon, wears tons of makeup, and dances alone under the streetlights when her family goes to bed.

There’s Aunt Lupe, crippled and bedridden from a diving accident or a fall (nobody knows), who lives an abysmal life lying limp, head tossed back, blind, waiting to die, yet nurturing Esperanza’s writing ambitions. Through Lupe, Esperanza learns about compassion and the frailty of life.

The many characters who appear only once are amazingly memorable. Often females young and old, they endure indignities and abuse at the hands of males who restrict and dominate them. Yet Cisneros describes these females as an unbiased journalist would, without judgment or anger.

We see Esperanza’s Mexican great-grandmother, her namesake, only long enough to know she was kidnapped as a young girl and forced into marriage, living out her life in bitterness toward her husband, who squelched her individuality and potential. She serves the young Esperanza as a symbol of what not to be.

Then there’s Esperanza’s incredibly beautiful classmate, Sally, who is beaten cruelly by a domineering father who fears she’ll run away like his sisters did long ago. After a while, Sally, stoic despite her bruises, defiantly engages in sex, knowing her father’s rage awaits her. She chooses a desolate path as an escape, teaching Esperanza the urgency of forging her own identity before it’s too late.

 The Primacy of Poetry

Those who didn’t know that poetry was a first love of Cisneros would guess this from the book’s imagery. The simplest things are endowed with little grace notes that surprise us, for Cisneros’ language is not what we ourselves would have invoked. Thus, the house on Mango Street has “windows so small, you’d think they were holding their breath.” Neighbor girls have “popsicle lips” and laughter “like shy ice cream bells.” A neighbor woman’s feet are described as “plump and polite, descended like white pigeons from the sea of pillow.”

But the most poetic portion of the book, near its end, is the chapter titled “Four Skinny Trees,” which is a prose poem from start to finish that symbolizes what Esperanza is and plans to become. A young woman about to embark on her own future, Esperanza describes “the four raggedy excuses planted by the city” thus: “Their strength is secret. They send ferocious roots beneath the ground. They…grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger. This is how they keep.”  The young girl’s final analysis of the trees is a description of her own resolve to follow her dreams and succeed: “Four who grew despite concrete. Four who reach and do not forget to reach.”

 Cisneros’ Place in Latina Literature

As this series about pioneering, modern-day American Latina authors has shown, Cisneros was not the first to be published. She was not the first to receive a coveted literary award. She was not the first to be acknowledged by non-Latinos as a writer whose work cut across cultural groups. Other Latinas whose books have been reviewed here—Nicholasa Mohr, Estela Portillo, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Cherrié Moraga—beat Cisneros to those accomplishments.

But Sandra Cisneros was the first modern American Latina to be published by a major mainstream publisher. She is thus often credited with opening the door to other Latina/o authors’ acceptance by the mainstream. So it is her name which oftentimes pops up first on the topic of Latina authors. It is Cisneros whose work is widely anthologized in multi-cultural books, whose work is selected for literature curricula across American schools. It is Cisneros who embodies the melding of two cultures, the Mexican and the American. With many prestigious awards for her talent, Cisneros has set a standard of excellence that awes. She is, after all, “La Sandra.”

Her other books include the novel “Caramelo” (2002); the short story collection “Woman Hollering Creek” (1991); the poetry books, “My Wicked, Wicked Ways” (1987) and “Loose Woman” (1994); and the anthology of excerpts from her works, “Vintage Cisneros” (2004). Her website is www.sandracisneros.com .

_______________________________________________________

Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D. is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009, Outskirts Press), which has won four national awards. Her short stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and other non-fiction have been published in literary and academic journals, literature textbooks, anthologies, blogs, and regional media off and on since the 1970’s. Her first poetry chapbook, Breath & Bone (Finishing Line Press, 2011) was a semi-finalist in a national poetry chapbook competition. Dr. Reyna is an adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. Her website is www.ThelmaReyna.com.

LOVING IN THE WAR YEARS

By Cherríe Moraga

South End Press, 1983

152 pages

Out of Print

Reviewed by

Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.

 Book Review #4 in the
PIONEER AMERICAN LATINA AUTHORS SERIES

________________________________________________________
 

This is a brave book, of a type that had never before been published in the United States. This is a timeless book that has one foot firmly planted in the 1980’s and the other just as solidly rooted in 2012. This book could, in fact, have been published yesterday, for its pain and truth and observations on humanity ring just as true today as when it first saw the light of day.

This is a trailblazing work that dared give public voice to something lying  dormant throughout the literary history of American Hispanics: Latina sexuality broadly, and Latina homosexuality specifically. But though this book deals in large part with a topic that is still taboo for many Latinos, let no reader shy away from Moraga’s work. Doing so would be a lost opportunity to open our eyes and souls to understanding humanity better. Through essays, poems, brief stories, and journal entries, Moraga forces us to think deeply on why men and women interact as we do, why we follow traditions blindly, why social injustice is so globally entrenched, and why we hardly ever stop to examine our lives to understand what it is that our spirits truly need.

Loving in the War Years is at once Moraga’s intimate, autobiographical reflection on love in all its senses and nuances; and a treatise on man’s inhumanity to man.  It is at once yin and yang, at once left-brain, right-brain, at once heart-wrenching and coolly analytical. This book was written by a poet…by a scientist…by a spiritualist…by an atheist…by a heterosexual…by a lesbian. And yes, all of these are Cherríe Moraga. The book is such a pot of delicious stew, filled as it is with the flavors and aromas of multiple genres and perspectives, that it must have driven librarians nutty upon its publication. How to classify it?

Like Moraga herself—who is half-White and half-Mexican—Loving in the War Years is full of life’s contradictions. Moraga’s immigrant, farm-worker mother is the linchpin in her life, the one who taught the author everything about authentic love. It is she who insists on a strong education for her children, and who sacrifices mightily to enable Cherríe to attend top-notch schools and avoid the hardships and discrimination that she, an illiterate laborer, suffers.  Yet the mother-daughter relationship is also tainted by the mother’s unpredictable aloofness and disregard for Cherríe’s individuality and worthiness as a woman. This tension sometimes leads Moraga to feel angry and hateful toward her, though she loves her mother above all.

Moraga’s White father is her ticket to a life among privileged people, the cause of her light skin, and ability to “pass” as White; yet his passivity and inability to love anyone render him irrelevant in her life. As Moraga evolves in her understanding, she realizes that it is her “Whiteness” that has spared her much of the prejudice and marginalization that her Latino schoolmates and neighbors endure. It is her “Whiteness” that got her into the best classes, the best colleges, and helped her rub elbows with the advantaged folks. But she also detests this Whiteness that made her an unwitting participant in the game of classifying people and thereby taking advantage of them. She feels like she betrayed her people.

This theme of being “la vendida” (“the sell-out”) runs through Moraga’s book and helps title its most compelling section: “A Long Line of Vendidas.” Moraga explores the various ways in which she was a “vendida”: leveraging her Whiteness for her academic and professional advancement; turning her back on schoolmates who weren’t in her elite classes; turning her back on lovers who created discomfort in her life; turning her back on Latino men as she defied her culture’s dictates. Her sell-out, however, is tempered by recollections of how her Latino culture turned against her throughout her early life: She wasn’t brown enough. She was half-White. She didn’t quite belong in their groups.  Like an unlucky criminal decreed guilty prematurely, Moraga was often seen by her peers and others as not Chicana enough. She ultimately had no choice but to lean on her Whiteness as she became more independent, because her White half led her to greater personal freedom than her Chicana half did.

Freedom and oppression are major themes for Moraga. Her sexuality is an integral part of her identity, as she feels is the case for all women, especially Latinas. Yet it is her sexual identity as a lesbian that simultaneously frees and oppresses Moraga: she is freed from the Mexican culture’s mythical view of women as penetrated and depraved; and she is oppressed by society’s rejection (especially her Latino culture’s rejection) of homosexuality as depraved and “queer.” Through her poetry, essays, and heartfelt stories that lay bare her soul yet are not self-pitying, Moraga shares with us her painful journey in recognizing her “queer”-ness at the tender age of ten, hiding this part of self from her family, fighting it by engaging in heterosexual affairs for several years, then accepting her lesbianism as her authentic sexuality. It is a touching journey that meanders in non-linear recollections throughout her book in and out of childhood, in and out of adolescence and young adulthood. She finally settles on intellectual discussions of women’s issues delivered professorially toward the end of her book.

Women, she says, are defined by our gender, and sexual politics rule our lives, with male supremacy controlling our access to freedom. Moraga describes marriage as man-made for the purpose of controlling women’s sexual activity. She focuses laser-like on women’s reproductive issues and sounds amazingly like the women activists of 2012 in her denouncement of patriarchy: “Female sexuality must be controlled, whether it be by the Church or the State….Patriarchal systems…determine when and how women reproduce.”

Echoing current political campaigning, Moraga wrote in her 1983 book: “In the U.S., the New Right’s response to a weakening economic system…is to institute legislation to ensure governmental control of women’s reproductive rights.” She went on to condemn Conservatives’ “advocacy of the Human Rights Amendment, which allows the fetus greater right to life than the mother. These backward political moves hurt all women, but especially the poor and ‘colored.’” Crediting the Black Feminist movement’s Combahee River Collective for her inspiration and perspective on oppression, Moraga adamantly sees global oppression of any people as being rooted in a toxic mix of racism, sexism, and classism. We can’t address one without the others.

Loving in the War Years  has ample artistic merit simply because of its poetic weaving of words and feelings. Moraga speaks from the heart. Its status is heightened, however, because this was the first book written and published in the United States by a Latina lesbian. Also one of the first modern American Latina feminists, Moraga’s  career has been marked by university teaching assignments across the U.S., prestigious literary awards and fellowships, and solid recognition of her playwriting talents. Currently an Artist-in-Residence at Stanford University, California, Moraga is the author or co-editor of more than a dozen books, chief among them the prize-winning collection of feminist writings titled This Bridge Called My Back. Visit her website at http://www.cherriemoraga.com .

_________________________________________________________

Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D. is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009, Outskirts Press), which has won four national awards. Her short stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and other non-fiction have been published in literary and academic journals, literature textbooks, anthologies, blogs, and regional media off and on since the 1970’s. Her first poetry chapbook, Breath & Bone (Finishing Line Press, 2011) was a semi-finalist in a national poetry chapbook competition. Dr. Reyna is an adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. Her website is www.ThelmaReyna.com.

EMPLUMADA

by Lorna Dee Cervantes

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press (1981)

68 pages   ISBN:  0-8229-5327-7

Reviewed by Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.

Book Review #3 in the
PIONEER AMERICAN LATINA AUTHORS SERIES

_____________________________________

Lorna Dee Cervantes (b. 1954) is a California native of Mexican-American and Native-American heritage. Her impact on Chicana poetry prior to and since the publication of her iconic, American Book Award-winning collection of poems, Emplumada (1981), has been tremendous. Her fellow Latino poet, Alurista, once  referred to her as “probably the best Chicana poet active today,” and others consider her to be one of the pre-eminent Chicana poets of the past four decades. During the Clinton presidency, Cervantes was invited to a special White House event honoring the top 100 poets in the United States at that time.

Her path to fame began with the Chicano activism and literary movement of the 1970’s. In 1974, she began reading her poetry publicly and now counts over 500 readings, poetic performances, and lectures in venues including the top universities in America: Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Brown, Vassar, and Cornell. Besides the American Book Award in 1982, Cervantes has won over 20 notable prizes, fellowships, and other honors, such as the Latino Book Award, Latin American Book Award, Patterson Prize for Poetry, and two Pushcart Prizes. Cervantes is a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.

As an academic for most of her career, Cervantes continues to exert a major  influence on American Latina poetry, despite authoring only three poetry collections besides Emplumada. These are: From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (1991); DRIVE: The First Quartet (2006); and Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems (2011). She founded the literary review Mango in the 1970’s and was co-editor of the multicultural poetry journal Red Dirt. Her poems have been anthologized since the 1990’s and have attracted wide critical study since the 1980’s.

Emplumada –which means “feathered” as well as “pen flourish”—treats the social issues of Cervantes’ day that still rattle our sensibilities: poverty, domestic and drug abuse, sexism, racism, classism. We relive these through the eyes and heart of a 27-year-old Latina clarifying her place in life. Cervantes occasionally spices her 39 poems with Spanish words and phrases that resonate with her Hispanic readers yet do not detract from the universality of her clear-eyed observations.

Her poetry makes us weep in recognition. Or weep for the deep slashes to humanity that she lays bare in her unvarnished way, capturing the pain we often inflict on one another in unconscious or purposeful ways. Her book begins with one of the more powerful poems, “Uncle’s First Rabbit,” a compressed retelling of 50 years of misery. At the age of 10, Uncle is forced by his drunken, violent father to shoot, then bash to death, an innocent rabbit. The rabbit’s dying cries remind the child of the night his father kicked his pregnant mother till her aborted baby died, his tiny sister’s cries like the rabbit’s. Throughout his military years and his own marriage, the Uncle is haunted by his father’s abuse, and he can’t escape the “bastard’s…bloodline” within himself, a man tormented by demons who one night “awaken[s] to find himself slugging the bloodied face of his [own] wife.” The Uncle’s humanity gasps its last breath as he watches his dying wife in bed and thinks: “Die, you bitch. I’ll live to watch you die.”

Lorna Dee Cervantes

The theme of abuse runs like an unavoidable snake through several of Cervantes’ poems. In “Meeting Mescalito at Oak Hill Cemetery,” a 16-year-old girl “crooked with drug” momentarily escapes her family life by drinking alone in a cemetery but then, at home, “lock[s] my bedroom door against the stepfather.” In “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway,” spousal abuse strikes multiple generations of a family: Grandma, who “built her house, cocky disheveled carpentry, after living twenty-five years with a man who tried to kill her.” Mama endures “glass bottles shattering the street, words cracked into shrill screams” when her man “entered the house in hard unsteady steps, stopping at my door, my name…breath full of whiskey.”

In “For Virginia Chavez,” one of the more gentle, evocative poems of the book, the speaker describes her loving relationship with a young woman, a kindred spirit whose path in life splits from hers. Years later, they reunite, and the speaker sees the abused Virginia “with blood in your eyes, blood on your mouth, the blood pushing out of you in purple blossoms. He did this.”  Embracing, the two women, whose lives have evolved in diametric ways, lean on their bond of friendship for sustenance. As in other poems, it is the inner strength and solidarity of women that help them prevail.

Cervantes also celebrates love, often by weaving this with nature, with the natural rhythms of existence that are often overlooked in harried lives. For her, nature is a balm that opens eyes and rekindles the spirit. In “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway,” the speaker describes her partner thus: “Every night I sleep with a gentle man to the hymn of mockingbirds, and in time, I plant geraniums.”  In “For Edward Long,” she salutes an old mentor, writing: “You taught me to read all those windsongs in the verses of Stevenson….I still gaze at the fall winds you once taught me to describe.”  In “Como lo Siento [How I Feel It],” lovemaking becomes allegory: “[An owl] lifted from the palm. She showed me how I rose, caught in the wind by your skin and tongue. I feel scooped from the banks like clay….I’m paralyzed by joy….I’m a shell in the cliffs, a thousand miles from sea. You tide me and I rise, and there’s no truth more simple.”

Emplumada is timeless and will continue to be. Its strength flows from the beauty and unpredictability of Cervantes’ phrasing. She takes the ordinary and holds it up for us to see, dressed in descriptions that we ourselves could not conjure. Her language is simple, direct, deceptively unadorned, but it is disarming in its precision: “In rarefied air, absent as lovers, objects are blanched and peppered to gray” ; “I dust pebbles, turn them to sheen”; “our time was mooning away from us and leaving us in mudflats”; “the great peacocks roosted and nagged loose the feathers from their tails.” And always, Cervantes’ imagery enhances and drives home her points.

Cervantes is, in the end, a poet who prefers to see the proverbial glass half-full but whose life experience has shown her the half-empty part in sharp focus. In perhaps the most autobiographical piece in the book—“Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person, Could Believe in the War Between Races”—she explains clearly how conflict indeed exists: “I’m marked by the color of my skin. The bullets are discrete and designed to kill slowly. They are aiming at my children. These are facts….I am a poet who yearns to dance on rooftops, to whisper delicate lines about joy and the blessings of human understanding….but the typewriter doesn’t fade out the sounds of blasting and muffled outrage. My own days bring me slaps on the face. Every day I am deluged with reminders that this is not my land and this is my land….in this country there is war.”

The passage of time will only cement Lorna Dee Cervantes’ place in the literary tapestry of America. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Creative Arts from San Jose State University, and attended the Ph.D. program at University of California, Santa Cruz. You can learn more about her on her Facebook author page and on her website: http://lornadice.blogspot.com/

_______________________________________________________

Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D. is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009, Outskirts Press), which has won four national awards. Her short stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and other non-fiction have been published in literary and academic journals, literature textbooks, anthologies, blogs, and regional media off and on since the 1970’s. Her first poetry chapbook, Breath & Bone (Finishing Line Press, 2011) was a semi-finalist in a national poetry chapbook competition. Dr. Reyna is an adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. Her website is www.ThelmaReyna.com.

Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings

By Estela Portillo Trambley

178 Pages

Originally Published by  Tonatiuh International,

1975 (First Edition)*

Reviewed by Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.

Book Review #2 in the
PIONEER AMERICAN LATINA AUTHORS SERIES

__________________________________

 One of the most historic books in the canon of Hispanic-American literature, Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings is iconic on several fronts. It was:

• the first collection of short stories written by an American Latina that was published in the United States;
• the first book written by an American Latina to win an important national literary award (Quinto Sol Award, 1972);
• the first book written by a woman to win the Quinto Sol Award;
• one of the first books published in English by a Latina in modern American literature, coming on the heels of Nicholasa Mohr’s pioneer novel, Nilda (1974).

The breadth of Portillo Trambley’s literary output—novels, drama, poetry, and nonfiction in addition to short fiction—contributed significantly to the evolution of Hispanic-American literature until her death in 1998 at the age of 62.

Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings includes nine short stories and the title piece, which is a novella. Although most of the stories are set in the southwestern United States, Portillo Trambley effectively uses international backdrops to elucidate some characters’ struggles and mindsets—ranging from Paris in “The Paris Gown,” to Spain in “Duende,” Vietnam in “Recast,” Germany in “The Secret Room,” and Mexico in various stories. This strategy imbues her writings with an eclectic flavor that makes her characters even more universal.

Often referred to as a feminist, Portillo Trambley created strong women whose resilience and resourcefulness emanated from their premiums on family, self-knowledge, community, and love. Her female cast is wide-ranging, but their lives are all circumscribed by a male-dominated society and unyielding tradition. Breaking free of restrictions requires Portillo Trambley’s women to buck tradition, to invent and reinvent themselves in their own image, and—sometimes—even to commit crime.

There is the aristocratic Clotilde Romero in “The Paris Gown,” who sacrifices her reputation in her last-ditch effort to evade an arranged marriage and thus win her freedom; Nan Fletcher in “Pilgrimage,” whose husband deserts her for a younger woman, and who now, through the religious piety of her housekeeper Cuca, must find her own peace in the world; Marusha, the alienated Spanish gypsy in “Duende,” whose family emigrated to America for a better life but whose poverty cuts through her soul as she seeks financial and career success in vain; Lela, the pagan healer in “The Burning,” whose ministerings to the village people were gifts of love that were ultimately rejected in ideological ignorance; and Lupe, an obese, unattractive young woman in “Rain of Scorpions,” who leads life to the fullest despite unfulfilled fantasies and who embodies selflessness and wisdom.

The boldest rebel against male oppression appears in the last short story of the book, “If It Weren’t for the Honeysuckle,” set in an isolated Mexican village. Beatriz, “a slender, small woman,” juxtaposes her abiding gentleness with a deliberateness that shocks. At the age of fourteen, she ran away with Robles, an abusive, middle-aged drunkard whom she knew was married and had children. But Beatriz was a virtual slave in her own home, cleaning and washing for nine demanding brothers, and saw an opportunity to establish her own life apart from men by becoming Robles’ lover, a traveling vegetable vendor who was often absent. A hard worker, Beatriz built her home with her own hands and even took in another of Robles’ mistresses. Beatriz’ tolerance of Robles’ abusiveness reached its limits, however, when he left a young, ailing girl with Beatriz one day and planned to ravage her upon his return a couple of weeks hence. Beatriz’ protectiveness toward the girl and her hatred of Robles’ violence toward women fused with her knowledge of gardening to conjure a plan that stopped Robles dead in his tracks.

Though Robles is Portillo Trambley’s most unsavory male in this book, there are others: Clotilde’s autocratic father in “The Paris Gown,” a man who cares more for social aggrandizement than for his daughter’s happiness; the Ayala brothers in “The Trees,” who give in to carnal pleasure, jealousy, and greed, thereby destroying the proud family heritage their father had built for them; Manolo, a New York actor who denigrates other struggling actors in his quest to become a star, and who loses more than his integrity in “Recast”;  and Chucho, an alcoholic wastrel in “Pay the Criers,” who steals and squanders his dead mother-in-law’s money intended for her funeral, then tries to belatedly make amends.

Yet Portillo Trambley, who strove to “discover…the miracle of people and a world,” as she wrote on the back cover of her book, saw beauty and goodness in men’s souls as she did in women’s. The most touching, sympathetic males in her book are not oppressive and rigid. In “The Secret Room,” Julius (Julio) Otto Vass Schleifer, a German heir in Mexico, reflects upon his deceased father’s fascination with Hitler and the “master race,” and realizes that there are greater things in life—such as social justice and true love—than one’s own culture and wealth,. In “Duende,” the gypsy immigrant Triano is widely known in his impoverished neighborhood as “a good listener…who melted well into life…[and] mended things and people.” His greatest unhappiness is his little sister’s lack of joy in life. Everything Triano does is aimed at helping her; his illiterate, devoted mother; and the struggling women he sees all around.

But Portillo Trambley saves her best for last: the title novella, in which brave, ordinary people, young and old, male and female, join forces to fight a greedy corporation’s destruction of their community and their people through unbridled pollution and deception. The male heroes in this novella—a war veteran named Fito who lost a leg in Vietnam; Papa At, who is Smeltertown’s resident sage and patriarch; and the twelve-year-old Miguel, an insightful boy who loves to learn and help others—ultimately meld their demands for justice, their pride in their Indian heritage, and their determination to solve their problems in a touching manner that forges a deeper level of community and peace in their daily lives.

Portillo Trambley is highly poetic in her writing. Her incisive observations of people and of life itself are so profound and so elegantly stated, one could write a small book of quoted excerpts from this work. She delves into the souls of her characters and helps us feel  their suffering. She expresses her recurrent themes—especially the preciousness of freedom, the importance of orderliness in life, and the diminution of women by a male society—in a cadence reminiscent of verse and great speeches, replete with alliteration, repetition, metaphors, and imagery.

For example, the author states: “It had been decreed long ago by man-made laws that living things were not equal. It had been decreed that women should be possessions, slaves, pawns in the hands of men with ways of beasts. It had been decreed that women were to be walloped effigies to burn upon the altars of men.” (p. 106) This elevates her prose to heavenly heights at many points in her book. Yet this quality is sometimes intertwined with the shortcomings of her work as well.

One criticism that has been leveled against the early work of Portillo Trambley, especially Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings, is that it is sometimes heavy-handed with preaching, that she editorializes rather than lets the story tell itself. This is a valid critique of her book. In addition, sometimes her descriptions, striving for poetic impact, are convoluted and thus not as effective as they might be were they streamlined and direct. For example: “A convex reflection of mood, the older woman was a human focal point against the subjectivity of artistic experience in meaningful arrangement around the room.” (p. 2) Stated simply: the woman was surrounded by beautiful pieces of well-placed art.

But experience shows us that the “firsts” of anything important are not as developed as they will eventually be. Portillo Trambley’s pioneering literature broke ground and glass ceilings. It gave voice to women authors where no woman’s voice was prevalent. It portrayed a unique culture that had been largely invisible on the literary stage. The testament to Portillo Trambley’s artistry came in her evolution, as all writers ideally grow and evolve. In the re-issue of Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings (see footnote below), Portillo Trambley’s refined critical eye caused her to replace a handful of the original stories with new ones and caused her to inject substantive changes to characters and themes in the original stories she kept. She had grown immensely as an author, but this should not diminish the validity and beauty of her early work.

___________________________________________________

*   A testament to the importance of this book is its 15^th anniversary re-issue by Bilingual Press in 1993. Portillo Trambley revised the book extensively and re-titled it Rain of Scorpions and Other Stories. Fans and scholars are thus able to compare the two versions of the book to better appreciate the evolution of the author’s long, distinguished career.

___________________________________________________

Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D. is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009, Outskirts Press), which has won four national awards. Her short stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and other non-fiction have been published in literary and academic journals, literature textbooks, anthologies, blogs, and regional media off and on since the 1970’s. Her first poetry chapbook, Breath & Bone (Finishing Line Press, 2011) was a semi-finalist in a national poetry chapbook competition. Dr. Reyna is an adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. Her website is www.ThelmaReyna.com.

Nilda, by Nicholasa Mohr

Arte Público Press: 2011

248 ppg.

Originally published by Harper & Row: 1974

Reviewed by Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.

Book Review #1

in the PIONEER AMERICAN LATINA AUTHOR SERIES.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Nicholasa Mohr (b. 1938) has been described as the most prolific and renowned Puerto Rican-American novelist. Born and raised in the Bronx, New York, Mohr represents the “Nuyorican” writers (“New York Puerto Ricans”), a group that first rose to national prominence for their considerable talents in the 20th century and who continue to attract readers today.

Since Puerto Ricans officially became American citizens in 1917, Mohr’s antecedents, though strongly tied to their island culture, were not immigrants, but migrants rather, in the often-alien, unwelcoming American city. Mohr grew up in the 1940’s, with World War II a gauzy backdrop, and suffered the proverbial slings and arrows of prejudice and discrimination.

That Nicholasa Mohr became a published writer when she did is a stroke of luck for Hispanic-American literature. As a young woman, she was first and foremost a visual artist. By chance, her art agent once asked her to write 50 pages of childhood reminiscences for a possible book project. Although he subsequently rejected this writing in a humiliating critique, she shared this small manuscript with a chief editor who had solicited her artwork for someone else’s book. Mohr’s illustrations for that book were turned down, but the editor liked the 50 pages of reminiscences and contracted Mohr to write a novel based on those. Mohr completed the novel, NILDA, that same year. The rest, as they say, is history.

With the well-received publication of NILDA in 1974, Mohr cemented her place in American literature. She was one of the earliest Hispanic-Americans to publish her writings in English in the United States and one of the first to write a young adult book in English. Mainstream America at that time had little interest in publications about Latino people. But Nicholasa Mohr’s book successfully crossed the divide. Since 1974, she has been the most productive and most renowned Nuyorican novelist, earning numerous major awards and publishing in a variety of genres: novels, short stories, novellas, and nonfiction. Her influence in other authors’ development has been significant, not just through her 10 published books, but also through her workshops and university teaching.

NILDA recounts the life of a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx from 1941 through 1945, as seen through the central consciousness viewpoint of the only daughter in the family and the youngest child, Nilda. Her family is poor, large, and as diverse in personality and outlook as her neighborhood. But these nine people, with their varying degrees of dysfunction and tension, are the source of stability and love that enable Nilda to navigate her childhood intact. She, as well as other Puerto Ricans, regularly encounters naked racism and marginalization, often at the hands of authority figures who should, paradoxically, be protecting and nurturing her: neighborhood policemen, nuns and priests at a Catholic summer camp, her teachers at school, and social service workers allegedly providing economic assistance for struggling families like hers. Worse, these perpetrators of racism are seemingly oblivious to their cutting words and actions. After policemen abuse her kind-hearted neighbor, Nilda notes that these cops “loomed larger and more powerful than all the other people in her life.”

The novel begins when Nilda is 10 years old and ends when she is 14. In this span of time, World War II begins and ends. Also, Nilda finds and loses religion; loses her stepfather; learns that her beloved brother Jimmy has impregnated and abandoned a young woman who is then sheltered by Nilda’s mother; helps care for her mentally unbalanced aunt; witnesses a policeman falsely accuse her friend of a crime and almost beat him to death; and endures other calamities that would have destroyed a lesser child. Through it all, Nilda is alternately petulant and carefree, defiant and obedient, aloof and moved to tears, frightened and resolute. Her best friend becomes pregnant and drops out of school. But Nilda exhibits the resilience of her mother and moves forward despite the biggest loss of all.

The Ramirez family is the broad backdrop of this narrative. Nilda’s mother, Lydia, is the matriarchal rock, an interminable font of patience, practicality, and initiative. She shepherds her family through quarrels, sickness, and despair and somehow manages to keep food on the table and consejos always flowing. Her strength comes from a deep religiosity that she tries to impart to her children, especially to Nilda, and from an almost martyr-like acceptance of her hard life. Her dreams are pinned on her children, especially her daughter, whom she constantly exhorts to study hard and make something of herself.

Nilda is tugged between her mother’s spirituality and her stepfather Emilio’s communistic, nihilistic rejection of faith. The parents’ polarity symbolizes the contradictions in the family members themselves: There is Jimmy—handsome, dashing, and utterly charming—yet embroiled with drugs and thugs and breaking his mother’s heart. There is Victor, the scholar and gentleman most suited for success, who is first to enlist in war and dash his mother’s dreams. There is Aunt Delia—old, deaf, and caustic—whose obsession with ghoulish newspaper reports is trumped by her vulnerability, which engenders the family’s loyalty to her. In a poignant scene toward the end of the book, we learn that Nilda’s mother, whose devotion to her family was the engine that drove her life, had deep regrets that embodied the most heart-wrenching contradiction of all.

People are the main ingredient of storytelling. People drive the plots and themes and embody the heart and soul of the structure we call literature. When people as literary characters are authentic and speak to us in voices we recognize, in voices that resonate with our own experiences, the written piece is successful. And if these characters engage in self-examination and reflection and share their insights with us, thus expanding our own self-knowledge as they reveal their own…well, the literature soars and takes us up with it.

Perhaps because NILDA is a young adult novel, or perhaps because it is a debut novel, it falls short in the latter criterion of excellence. Although the child Nilda is sympathetic and authentic, she rarely engages in reflection, even as a teenager, and this renders her less multi-dimensional than she could have been. The central consciousness viewpoint of the book does not allow us to enter the minds of the other characters, but Nilda’s thoughts could have been explored further.
Literary critics of ethnic-minority works have pointed out that early writers often focus on their personal minority experiences, which often include prejudice and various levels of cultural and racial oppression. It is the evolution of these authors’ art that eventually expands their creativity outward, to broader, more universal themes.

NILDA, as a pioneering novel, captures the unique cultural experiences of New York’s Puerto Ricans in the 1940’s and therefore secures a solid place in the history of our literature as such. It still resonates decades later because its cultural depictions of family, love, individual pride, and resilience in the face of hardship still matter.

_____________________________________________________________________

Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D. is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009, Outskirts Press), which has won four national awards. Her short stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and other non-fiction have been published in literary and academic journals, literature textbooks, anthologies, blogs, and regional media off and on since the 1970’s. Her first poetry chapbook, Breath & Bone (Finishing Line Press, 2011) was a semi-finalist in a national poetry chapbook competition. Dr. Reyna is an adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. Her website is www.ThelmaReyna.com.