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

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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/

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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.

“…y no se lo tragó la tierra”
aka “…And the Earth Did Not Devour Him”
Written by Tomás Rivera
Published by Arte Público Press 1987
First published in 1970 by Quinto Sol

Review and reminiscence by Luís Torres
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During the last few months we’ve been taking second looks at some of the books that – for one reason or another – are considered classics of Chicano literature. Personally, it’s been a worthwhile experience re-reading books that I first read thirty or even forty years ago. We are not the same person today that we were some years before. It’s hoped that we’ve learned a bit more about the world – and ourselves – every day we live. So our perspective evolves, we hope. And so when we sit down to read something that we read many years before, we are inevitably reading it through a different prism today.

In giving a second look at books such as Ernesto Galarza’s “Barrio Boy,” José Antonio Villareal’s “Pocho,” and Rudolfo Anaya’s venerable “Bless Me, Ultima” I was generally delighted to discover that the stories that were told and the textures revealed in the storytelling not only held up but seemed to have ripened with age. A bit like a fine wine. That’s encouraging.

This time around we’re taking a second look at a little jolla of a book that was among the very first books we could actually classify as “Chicano literature.” It’s the legendary gem by Tómas Rivera. Its actual title is – and it is written in lower case – “…y no se lo tragó la tierra.” The title of the book has been variously translated as “And the Earth Did Not Part” or “…And the Earth Did Not Devour him.”

It remains a treasure.

I first read Rivera’s quixotic little novel soon after it was published, in 1971. I was a sophomore in college. For those born after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have to go into the Way Back Machine for some exposition.

In the early seventies we were in on the ground floor of the development of something called “Chicano studies.” A few classes were beginning to be offered, mostly in politics, sociology and history. There were very few courses on Chicano literature. (In undergraduate school I actually tried to turn all of my regular courses into Chicano studies courses. In an Urban History class, I wrote term papers about “Chicanos in the City,” in sociology classes I wrote papers about “The Sociology of the Chicano Gang Life” and on and on. You get the idea.) But back to Chicano literature.

I was in what must have been one of the first Chicano literature classes ever. And – guess what?– there wasn’t a lot of Chicano literature available. There was some energetic poetry that we’d find in pulp periodicals. There were a few plays, mostly material from El Teatro Campesino. And there were a few short stories available from small, grassroots publishers. The explosion of Chicano literature was just around the corner. In that first Chicano lit class I took we mostly relied on Mexican materials. “The Death of Artemio Cruz” by Carlos Fuentes. “The Labyrinth of Solitude” by Octavio Paz. You get the picture. And then came “…y no se lo tragó la tierra.”

I was a pretty voracious reader in high school. I read all the typical American writers that the English teachers recommended. I was enthralled by stories and ideas that were far removed from my own experiences growing up on L.A.’s eastside. I was captivated by different characters and moved by their motivations and desires and goals – and setbacks. But I was always looking for characters who looked like my family, talked like my family and, essentially, acknowledged that people like us existed. As a kid in the library the closest I got to that, it seemed, were some works by Steinbeck which included occasional glimpses into the lives of Mexican Americans or Mexicans.

Then came “…y no se lo tragó la tierra” by Tómas Rivera.

Again, this was forty years ago. Here was a book that — what do you know? –was about us. It was about tios and tias and abuelitos. It was about the kind of backbreaking work that many of our families did at one time or another. It was about dreams and meditations that meant something to us. It was about characters and stories and ideas that were ours, as well as being universal. It was a revelation to read that little book so many years ago. And after reading it again very recently, it’s clear that it is a slice of American fiction that holds up to scrutiny and, beyond that, is likely to be established for generations to come as a beautifully written and thought-provoking work of art.

It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from. If you are moved by good writing and insightful storytelling, you cannot help but be captivated by “Tierra.” It is a slightly mysterious book. It breaks lots of rules about the structures of literature. It makes up its own rules in some cases. There is no clearly identified central protagonist. There is not really a linear narrative. There is not a cavalcade of named characters with motivations and idiosyncrasies that we customarily follow.

Instead, “Tierra” is constructed as a loosely arranged montage of soliloquies, observations, snatches of conversation that we eavesdrop upon, as well as more conventionally constructed “mini stories.” You are immersed in a specific world. It is, ostensibly, a world of poor Mexican American migrant workers in the 1940s and 1950s who follow the piscas every season from Texas to the northern Midwest. It is nominally about a young chicanito who is beginning to explore and question the world around him. But those are elements in the book. The joy comes from the wonderful integration of those seemingly random elements into a coherent whole.

In some respects Rivera’s book reminds you of Eduardo Galeano’s works, with small almost stream-of-consciousness descriptions of things. For example, this five-line observation is, by itself, an entire “chapter” in Rivera’s book:

“What his mother never knew was that every night he would drink the glass of water that she left under the bed for the spirits. She always believed that they drank the water and so she continued doing her duty. Once he was going to tell her but then he thought he’d wait and tell her when he was grown up.”

Some of these little observations are, to me, evocative of haiku. At other times Rivera’s book makes you feel as if you entered a Chicano house, sat in the living room, and overheard a conversation going on in the kitchen. The characters aren’t identified nor described. But we know them:

“Comadre, do you all plan to go to Utah?”
“No, compadre. I’ll tell you, we don’t trust the man that’s contracting people to go work in –how do you say it?”
“Utah. Why, comadre?
“Because we don’t think there’s such a state. You tell me, when’ve you ever heard of that place?”
“Well, there’s so many states. And this is the first time that they’ve contracted for work in those parts.”
“Yeah, but tell me, where is it?
“We, we’ve never been there but I hear it’s somewhere close to Japan.”

If, like me, you read “…y no se lo tragó la tierra” years ago, you’re in for a treat if you pick it up again. And if you’ve never read Rivera’s book, I envy you. You get to read it for the first time. You are really in for a treat.

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Luis Torres, a journalist and writer from

Pasadena, California, is at work on a

book that examines the 1968 East  Los

Angeles high school student walkouts.

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

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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 .

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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

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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.

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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

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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 .

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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.

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

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“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 .

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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

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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 .

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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.

“Pocho”

Written by José Antonio Villareal

First Publication Knoft Books, 1959

Current edition: Anchor Books

187 pages

Reviewed by Luís Torres

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“Pocho” by José Antonio Villareal is one of the earliest novels by a Mexican American writer. It was first published by Knopf Doubleday in 1959 and is still in print and available from Anchor Books, an imprint of Random House. Encompassing key aspects of the Chicano experience from the 1920s to the 1940s, “Pocho” still holds powerful resonance for today.

Literary scholars like to show us how sophisticated they are by using all kinds of obscure words and phrases to characterize various styles and genres of literature. A book such as “Pocho” is characterized as a bildungsroman. That’s simply German for “coming of age story,” and indisputably “Pocho” can be described as a coming-of-age novel. It charts the adolescence of Richard Rubio, a character who struggles to define himself as he draws on the strengths and weaknesses from two worlds – that of the mexicano and that of the “American.” Rubio, born in 1919, is the child of a one-time revolucionario foot soldier who fought under Pancho Villa and a subservient, presumably “typical” Mexican village girl. The chaos of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 eventually pushes the family al norte where they end up in rural Santa Clara, California.

A constant theme of the story is the tension Mexican immigrants face as they are pulled (and pushed) by two cultures and two languages. It is a theme that appears, sometimes subtly and sometimes heavy-handedly, in many Chicano novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Here Villareal generally handles these struggles with a deft narrative touch. We see what is happening to the characters as they evolve. We hear their struggle in their voices as they inevitably confront the push and pull of the cauldron of duality in which they are distilled. Villareal effectively “shows”; he doesn’t “tell”. In Richard Rubio’s case it is often a difficult journey, forcing him to embrace his “Mexicanness” (as embodied in boldface in his mother and father) at times and compelling him to adopt a more “American” perspective as he grows and begins to question the world around him. He becomes a distillation of both worlds and becomes someone who “knows himself.”

Like Villareal himself, Richard Rubio grows up in a world that is immediately defined by the quotidian existence that comes with being a Mexican immigrant family eking out a living by picking the crops in the Santa Clara Valley. One season it is prunes, the next it can be asparagus. It is arduous, mind-numbing work. Richard is a kid who dreams of a world beyond his immediate circumstances. He haunts the tiny public library, devouring seemingly every book on the shelves. He realizes it would be a gigantic leap, but he dreams of someday going to college and being a writer. Such goals are not easily accessible for a young man of his circumstances, especially when the family is forced to deal with the challenges of the Great Depression by the time Richard is a teenager.

But he persists, all the while working to understand the people around him and, tellingly, working to understand himself and what his essence is. His chums are Mexicans and Italians and Japanese Americans. He confronts discrimination, prejudice and oppression in their many forms. He and his friends are busted by the cops and beaten for no reason, apparently, other than being “other.”

Meanwhile, his father and his mother begin to tear each other apart. In doing so, they begin to tear themselves apart. Richard is a witness to his father’s many infidelities and his long-suffering mother’s attempts to become strong and independent “in this new country.” The father berates her for being “Americanized.” She challenges his domineering, macho ways. The clashes threaten to lead to a kind of personal disintegration on Richard’s part, but now he’s strong enough not to let it do so. Ultimately, he determines that he can play no role in such chingasos. He can’t really take sides. He resents the idea that his parents try to make him choose one over the other. He loves them both, but realizes he has to focus on his own life, his own challenges and his own aspirations. All the while he is somewhat torn between two cultures, but works to create his own identity – drawing strength from the positive dimensions of each culture.

As the United States enters WWII after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he enlists in the navy. He is both getting away from something and heading toward something – a future he hopes to have his own say in. He has to become his “own person.” That is the only way he can survive and eventually thrive. It’s a narrative arc that, of course, resonates with many Chicanos.

Now more than fifty years after it was first published, “Pocho” still has a strong, engaging narrative and the ideas at the core of the story are still relevant. However, there is a strange dimension to it, too. Some of the attitudes embodied by Richard’s father, Juan, seem indefensible given our social consciousness today. (I first read the book some thirty years ago and wasn’t struck by some of those things as much as I was on this latest reading.) Specifically, I’m talking about the heedless swaggering negative machismo that drives the book, particularly in the beginning.

The first few chapters are told from Juan Rubio’s point of view. We meet Juan (Ruben’s father) when he is a young man leaving the revolutionary struggle about the time Pancho Villa is assassinated. The scenes of near casual sexual abuse of women are disquieting to say the least. And it’s not as if such incidents are presented in a way that would lead the reader to question such negative macho behavior. It’s as if we are supposed to blithely accept such actions and attitudes as “normal” for Mexicans. Again, it is disquieting. I would be interested to read what today’s feminist literary scholars would make of those portions of the book.

Yet, despite that “Pocho” is an accomplished bit of storytelling. It is still valuable as one of the big stones that helped lay the foundation for the many Chicano/a bildungsroman novels that were to come.

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Luís Torres is the author of a forthcoming book about the life and legacy of activist/educator Vahac Mardirosian.

Copyright 2012 Luis R. Torres

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

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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/

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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.

“Revolt of the Cockroach People”

Written by Oscar Zeta Acosta

Vantage Books Edition published in 1989

First published by Straight Arrow Books in 1973

Reviewed by Luís Torres
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As we continue our “second looks” at landmark books of the Chicano experience, here is a renewed look at “The Revolt of the Cockroach People,” by Oscar Zeta Acosta aka “The Brown Buffalo.”

“Revolt” was the second book by Acosta, the rumpled attorney who passed the bar by the skin of his teeth and exuberantly joined in the noisy street activism of the Chicano movement in East L.A. in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And wasn’t that a time!  His first book was “Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo,” which bears as much resemblance to genuine autobiography as “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” by Gertrude Stein. It wasn’t a conventional autobiography to say the least.

Acosta is probably best known for his friendship/partnership with the wild man of letters, Hunter S. Thompson, and for the mysterious circumstances of his death (or disappearance) in Mexico in 1974. Both Acosta and Thompson made no secret of their ardor for hallucinogenic drugs, distilled spirits and the social chaos those elements ignited. It appears that in his life Acosta might have had difficulty distinguishing reality from illusion.

And that is certainly the case with his book, “The Revolt of the Cockroach People.” Are the events he depicts “real” or are they creations of his imagination? Is the book “documentary” or is it “fiction”? With this book, it’s impossible to tell. For some readers, that’s its charm. For me, that’s its problem. Of course, writers have blended fact and fiction before with genuine success. We all remember Truman Capote’s “non-fiction novel” “In Cold Blood.” That’s an exquisitely written book, no doubt. But I’ve always had problems with its schizophrenia. In some cases Capote uses real names involved in that gruesome murder at the core of the book. In other cases, he invents characters – and scenes and dialogue and everything else, as you would in a conventional novel.

Acosta’s “The Revolt of the Cockroach People” suffers from the same problem, and to a much greater degree. The book is certainly a milepost when it comes to accounts by and about Chicanos. It was among the first generation of books that sought to tell some of our stories, from our point of view. It has its moments, that’s for sure. But it suffers from some weaknesses as well.

Its apparent attempts at a kind of stream-of-consciousness approach more closely resemble unbridled ramblings of someone not unfamiliar with a certain wacky tabacky. And there’s the big issue of “what’s real” and “what’s invented” throughout the book. Lawyers like to question witnesses who seem to have made contradictory statements by asking, “Were you lying then, or are you lying now?” Whatever the answer, the jurors are not likely to look favorably on the testimony of such a witness being grilled.

In Acosta’s case, this is an issue that detracts from the potential of the book. (And there are a few tightly written passages with some laudable satirical humor in the book.) You can’t have it both ways. Either you are documenting (and sometimes skewering) actual pivotal events of the Chicano movement, or you are just making things up. He writes the book as if it were “real,” but it is unequivocally NOT. As it happens, I was there at some of the events he describes. I knew the people he talks about, with their names changed. The minute you are emancipated from being accurate, then you have license to “make things up.” And that’s okay when it’s demonstrably fiction. But it’s not okay when it’s fiction masquerading as fact.

But let’s put that issue aside for a moment. Let’s look at other dimensions of the book. Is the book engaging? Are there characters that captivate you? Is there some sort of intriguing dramatic movement that builds in the story? Is it a story well told? Sadly, the answer is generally “no” to all of the above? So, why did we read it so eagerly when it was first published back in 1973? Partly, I think, because we as Chicano were so desperate to read anything about “us” that wasn’t written by some gringo with an anthropologist’s magnifying class in one hand and an English-Spanish dictionary in the other. Hey, one of “us” wrote a book about us, let’s read it.

Acosta “documents” his participation in the aftermath of key Chicano events such as the activism of Catolicos Por La Raza to urge the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese to spend money on the poor instead of on lavish architectural moments, the police brutality at the Chicano Moratorium of 1970, the killing of journalist Ruben Salazar by an L.A. County Sheriff’s deputy and the earth-shaking East L.A. school walkouts. But his telling of those tales suffers from that “fact” versus “fiction” dichotomy.  It gives the impression of a book cobbled with apparent haste and held together with chicle and duct tape. It’s worth reading, but when it comes to veracity about key historical events of the Chicano Movement, consider the book with a grano de sal.

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Luís Torres is the author of the forthcoming book

“The Children of Doña Julia: The Life and Legacy of Vahac Mardirosian.”

“Becoming Dr. Q: My Journey from Migrant Farm Worker to Brain Surgeon”

Written by Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, MD with Mim Eichler Rivas

Published by University of California Press, 2011

Reviewed  By Luís Torres

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The Remarkable Story of An Undocumented Mexican Farmworker

 Who Made it To Harvard Medical School and Became a Famous Neurosurgeon

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The real-life story of Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa is so amazing and seemingly unbelievable that your first reaction is to think it’s a Hollywood movie script. It seems that improbable. But it’s true. As relayed in his book “Becoming Dr. Q: My Journey from Migrant Farm Worker to Brain Surgeon,” it’s the story of an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who comes to the United States to toil picking fruit in California, works diligently, quickly learns English, shows intellectual promise and goes on to graduate from UC Berkeley, then goes to Harvard Medical School and eventually becomes one of the world’s leading brain surgeons. Hard to believe, but again, it really happened.

Now, neurosurgeon Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa has set down his personal life story (with help from co-writer Mim Eichler Rivas) in a riveting and heart warming autobiography. Today “Dr. Q”, as he refers to himself because folks who don’t speak Spanish have a tough time pronouncing his tongue-twisting multi-syllabic surname, is a pioneer in brain surgery innovations at prestigious Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.  He is tops in his field. But just 25 ago he was “just another migrant farmworker” working in the fields of California’s Central Valley. Quite a remarkable story.

How did he accomplish so much, coming from such humble beginnings? That’s the engaging story told in “Becoming Dr. Q.”  It is a story of perseverance, the power of imagination and a dedication to intellectual curiosity. It is the story of overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles with the help and guidance of family and educational mentors. It is a story about following your dreams and never giving up. Quite a story, and all the more captivating because it’s true. If the book were written as a novel, it would probably have been rejected by a publisher because the story seems just too improbable to be believed.

Quiñones-Hinojosa was born and raised in the tiny, dusty town of Polaco near Mexicali in Baja California. He was born into a family that constantly struggled to make financial ends meet. But the family was rich in one respect – the support and love that nourished everyone in the family. That was one key to his eventual success in the world. By the time he was nineteen he had completed coursework in Mexico to qualify for a certificate in education, something that prepared him to be a sort of entry-level school teacher. But things didn’t quite pan out and he decided to head to the United States to earn some money.

He tells the harrowing story of sneaking into the country, facing the prospects of jail – or worse. He had heard many stories of undocumented immigrants who died in the desert trying to make it to a new life. But he made it to California and found work in the fields and in a number of odd jobs, always showing that he was an exceedingly bright, resourceful young man. Eventually he took classes at a community college in Stockton and quickly excelled.  He writes, “My enrollment at night classes at San Joaquin Delta College inaugurated a period of great growth and learning for me.”

That led to the wild idea of applying for admission to the University of California. His grades were solid and his aptitude and keen intellect impressed the administrators and professors who interviewed him at Berkeley.

A few years later, with the help and guidance of academic mentors he was accepted at Harvard Medical School after graduating from UC Berkeley. And, again, with encouragement and assistance from mentors he excelled there as well. Because of those experiences, he is devoted to helping others along the way. And that’s one of the reasons he wrote the memoir. He writes, “My hope is that my unlikely story may light a spark in a boy or girl who currently faces bleak prospects to embrace the power of his or her imagination and special magic. Or spur an exhausted medical resident to know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel – in the best meaning of the phrase!”

He adds: “(My hope is) especially, to encourage any of us who allow ourselves to judge others by their ethnicity of socioeconomic background to open our eyes to all that we have in common.”

A remarkable tale, and one that is well told in “Becoming Dr. Q.”

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Luís Torres, a veteran journalist and frequent contributor to Latinopia, is the author of the forthcoming book “Doña Julia’s Children: The Life and Legacy of Vahac Mardirosian.”

“Barrio Boy”  by Ernesto Galarza

University of Notre Dame Press

First published in 1971

Reviewed by Luis R. Torres

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A Second Look at a Classic of Chicano Literature

Some weeks back Jesús Treviño, the captain of the Latinopia ship, and I agreed to re-examine some of the classics of Chicano literature. This new look at the seminal book by Ernesto Galarza continues that effort. “Barrio Boy” is a masterpiece of autobiography and memoir and its deceptively simple, crystalline prose and its keen historical observations still resonate for Chicanos as well as non-Chicanos interested in learning something about “us” – our history and our frame of reference.

It was a delight to read it again all these years later. “Barrio Boy” was first published in 1971 when Galarza was well into his sixties and after decades as an indisputably accomplished renaissance man who had made indelible marks as a political activist, historian and scholar. It is still a pleasure to read this book and it has a lot to tell us about the general arc of Mexican/Chicano history that is personified by Galarza’s own narrative journey.

The memoir is told through the prism of a child who, we quickly discover, is exceedingly bright, inquisitive and remarkably observant. It describes his journey from a tiny village in the state of Nayarit to the barrio of Sacramento, California. His family, like thousands of others in Mexico, was forced to flee the chaos and dislocation caused by the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Galarza was born in Jalcocotán in 1905.

The book is the engaging story of his personal journey. His arrival in the United States sets the stage for a child’s perceptions of the strangeness of the language, customs and social dynamics of this country. Because of his individual strength and fortitude, Galarza accommodates to this new world with relative ease and he quickly begins to thrive, starting in elementary school. El era muy vivo. The story is told in the voice of a boy discovering and beginning to make sense of the world around him.

Dr. Ernesto Galarza

In a preface to “Barrio Boy” Galarza explains that the book is based on anecdotes he had long told his family and friends about growing up, essentially transforming himself from a mexicano to what we would now call a modern day Chicano. Fiercely proud of his heritage, he nonetheless absorbs the culture and ethos this strange world called the United States. It is an odd world, but one filled with stimulating challenge and opportunity. For years Galarza had been encouraged to write down those recollections. He sat down to do it for what he calls “historical” reasons. But he also emphasizes something quite important, and that is, that he wanted the book to dismiss the sociological balderdash that was heard so often in the 1950s and 1960s – that somehow Mexicans who came here, or their progeny, had somehow lost their “identity.” Nonsense, he says.

With razor sharp simplicity he writes: “Psychologists, psychiatrists, social anthropologists and other manner of ‘shrinks’ have spread the rumor that these Mexican immigrants and their offspring have lost their ‘self-image.’ By this, of course, they mean that a Mexican doesn’t know what he is; and if by chance he is something, it isn’t any good. I, for one Mexican, never had any doubts on this score. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know who I was. Those I knew and remember and tell about had an abundance of self-image and never doubted that it was a good one.” Punto.

Today, as Chicanos, we may be a distillation of two worlds, two cultures, but we are whole human beings. Galarza never had any doubts about that.

In “Barrio Boy” we see, even at a very early age, the evolution of Galarza’s frame of reference regarding fairness, justice and the struggle of the “outsider.” He keenly observes the dynamics of labor in the ranchos of Nayarit. He saw how peones were sometimes treated as chattel and not as human beings. He writes: “For me the world began to divide itself into two kinds of people – the men on horseback and the men who walked.” Many years later, as he began to organize farmworkers in California in the 1950s, he was keenly aware of the oppression that workers faced at the hands of the agribusiness owners and callous labor contractors, the “men on horseback.”

Galarza thrived as a teenager in Sacramento, leaving the barrio for higher education. He received degrees from Occidental College in Los Angeles, Stanford University and Columbia University. His doctoral dissertation at Columbia was about industrialization in Latin America. That led to work at the organization that was the precursor to the Organization of American States. He returned to California in the 1950s where he began the difficult task of organizing farmworkers, laying the foundation for the valuable work that Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta were to do, beginning in the 1960s. His intimate work among farmworkers led to his most acclaimed book, “Merchants of Labor” which exposed the abuses of the infamous bracero guest-worker program. He eventually went on to a career as an acclaimed writer and much admired scholar.

The work “pioneer” is often used too freely today. But there is no hyperbole in stating emphatically that Ernesto Galarza was a genuine pioneer in many fields. “Barrio Boy” gives us the window into Galarza’s early life and how he drew on those experiences as a man on a quest to enlighten society about the historical roots and cultural frame of reference of today’s Chicanos. We can learn a great deal about ourselves and our place in history by reading “Barrio Boy.” We should be grateful to Galarza for his work and for taking the time to put down the string of anecdotes that comprise this wonderful little memoir.

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Luis Torres, a journalist and writer from

Pasadena, California, is at work on a

book that examines the 1968 East  Los

Angeles high school student walkouts.

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

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 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.

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*   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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Global Capitalist Crisis and the Second Great Depression:
Egalitarian Systemic Models for Social Change

By Dr. Armando Navarro

2012, Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

Reviewed  Dr. José Calderon

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The book “Global Capitalist Crisis and the Second Great Depression: Egalitarian Systemic Models for Social Change” is a testament to Armando Navarro’s forty-four years of activism, thirty-seven years of teaching, and a lifetime of seeking alternatives to the historical inequities of U. S. capitalism.  Navarro has always sought ways to connect his academic research and teaching to practical organizing and he does it well in this thoughtful discourse.

This book is timely. All people, regardless of their political persuasion, are facing the realities of the crisis of Capitalism and Navarro gets at the historical and structural reasons for this crisis.  The historical aspect of the book looks at the consistent contradictions of a system that is based on profit above everything else and details how the U. S. has been through 48 recessions when there were downturns in the Gross Development Product, periods of overproduction, loss of jobs, and lowering of quality of life. Navarro observes that this was often done through colonization and using the markets of other countries that were under the control of the U. S. to ease the internal domestic crisis and to get production going again.

A compelling aspect of Narvarro’s narrative is that he distinguishes between a recession and depression, He is consistent in documenting the cyclical nature of these economic crises as being rooted in an economic structure whose primary interests are focused on profit and not on the well-being of the majority of people nationally and globally.  The structure itself is held responsible for a melt-down of financial institutions and millions of workers hurled into unemployment, poverty, hunger and homelessness.

Armando’s book details how the present global economic crisis is steadily eroding the U. S.’s historical hegemony and how the second great depression in the United States is driving a global capitalist and economic crisis.

Background: before and after World War II, the U. S. remained top dog and could get out of its recessions through passing on the crisis to other nations.  Armando’s book relates how “right after World War II, capitalism went from welfare capitalism (which had begun with FDR’s New Deal in 1933) to the rise of neoliberal capitalism (particularly with the election of  Ronald Reagan) who replaced Keynes’s thinking with a flexible market strategy that implemented tighter global economic links through privatization  (transferring ownership of business from the public sector ( the government) to the private sector (business) and advancing market deregulation reforms  as a means to generate competition, efficiency, and growth.”

But today, Navarro shows us, not every country is accepting neoliberalism and that globalization includes many nations now developing their own economies, on the one hand, while tied interdependently to a world capitalist economy on the other.  Here, Armando’s book looks at some examples of “the winds of socialist change in Latin America” such as that led by Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution.

The issue of planning in the interests of the majority is a key issue for Navarro. The character of monopoly capitalism is that it has the highest level of planning in individual corporations that do everything competitively to reap the most profits.  However, there is a lack of planning on a national and international level and, as Armando’s book proposes, rather than a culture of collectivity dominating to use the earth’s resources to solve the many problems threatening our survival, there is a culture of greed and selfishness in the forefront.

What Armando and I have in common, flowing from the calls for structural change in this book, is the proposition that “the crisis is creating an opportunity to transform U. S. capitalism into a benevolent, humane, egalitarian, socially and economically just democratic system.”  We concur that there is a need to advance a dialogue on the contradictions inherent in the system of capitalism, deepen research on the new local and global economic models that are emerging, and promote the growth of a movement based on the creation of transformative structural models of equity.

This movement, part of what Armando is proposing in his book, is one that is based on rethinking the nature of ownership and rethinking the definition of “growth” as a basis for gauging whether there is progress.  We need more study, innovation, and implementation: how to build examples of “systemic change,” where the resources are used for a new type of growth that is rooted in creating a better quality of life for all.  This can include worker-owned companies, cooperatives, and social enterprises that use the people’s resources for serving just and equitable community-building goals. There is a need to build a new movement that is collective and based on challenging the undemocratic policies bred by the character of the old systemic structure.

As an example, in the state of California, community-based coalitions have challenged the federal government’s immigration enforcement policies by organizing and passing legislation allowing undocumented students, not only to go to college, but to receive financial aid.  In the city of Pomona, a coalition of pro-immigrant organizations, Pomona Habla, changed city council policies that discriminated against undocumented immigrants and were part of a larger movement resulting in the passage of a statewide bill allowing anyone stopped at a checkpoint without a driver’s license to have someone come and pick up their car.  This will kill the millions of dollars being made by the tow truck and impoundment companies.

The governor, as a result of these movements, also signed a bill that called for “neither California nor any of its cities, counties, or special districts require an employer to use E-Verify as a condition of receiving a government contract, applying for or maintaining a business license, or as a penalty for violating licensing o other similar laws.”

These same coalitions are gathering signatures now to enact a new law that gives qualified undocumented immigrants who pay state income taxes the option to enter a program whose participants will gain relief from federal enforcement and whose labor will be decriminalized.

Armando’s book is a stand out. It gives us the structural and historical roots of this economic crisis, and also provides a longer-term vision of what our global world can begin to look like and what type of “transformational leadership” it will take locally and nationally to make it a reality.  It is a compelling contribution to the dialogue going on about the problems in the economic systems that we know today, Capitalist, Socialist, and Social Democratic, with the outlook that there is a need for new theories and new models that can pave the way for a new economy.

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“Bless Me, Ultima” by Rudolfo Anaya

First published 1972

Reviewed by Luís Torres

March 8, 2012

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Jesús Treviño, the man behind the curtain at Latinopia, had a solid idea. Why not take another look at some of the books that have become classics in Chicano literature? (I regularly write contemporary book reviews for a number of newspapers.) I thought Treviño’s idea was an excellent one and I agreed to be part of a team to take on the challenge. We thought it would be a good idea to begin with arguably the most storied Chicano novel of all time. We are talking, of course, about Rudolfo Anaya’s landmark novel “Bless Me, Ultima.”

First published by a small publishing house back in 1972 it has since sold nearly a half-a-million copies. It has satisfied readers, both Latino and non-Latino, with its impeccable storytelling and its universal analysis of the threshold between innocence and understanding, between wonder and awareness, between the power of the spirit and the presumed rationality of the intellect. It is about the power of myth and legacy. Now published and distributed by a mainstream publishing house, it is still enthralling readers. It has won the praise of critics and captured the hearts of readers in the United States and beyond. And deservedly so.

It is still captivating readers and winning critical praise. This year Anaya will be awarded the Robert Kirsch Prize for literature by the Los Angeles Times, an award recognizing lifetime achievement.

Reading the novel again recently was like encountering an old friend. Can it be that I first read it more than forty years ago? Has time raced that quickly? “Bless Me, Ultima” has become an iconic tapestry of Chicano literature, and it has inspired an entire generation of Latino fiction writers. Upon reading it again, it becomes clear why that is so.

The novel “holds up.” And then some. When we read a book that’s beautiful or somehow moves us, we are

Original Art by Dennis Martinez

participating in a process. We bring something to the book, based on our experiences and our perspectives. You are not the same person who read the book forty years ago, and so you imbue the experience with your own memories, recollections and, one hopes, insights into the world around us. And the book, if superbly written, isn’t exactly the same book either. It is certainly moored in the craftsmanship and thoughtfulness that made it compelling in the first place. Fundamentally, the book hasn’t changed, but we have. But, in a sense, the book has “evolved” as you, the reader, have evolved. Reading it again recently was an extremely satisfying experience. (In fact, I read “Bless Me, Ultima” a second time about twenty years ago when I was nearing the age of forty and it stood out not only as a wonderful work of art but as a reflection of my own life and frame of reference.) The third time was quite a charm.

For readers who were born during the Bill Clinton administration, maybe a note or two about the social-cultural cauldron that existed in Aztlán in the early 1970s when the book was first embraced by readers is in order. It was published at a time when college students were eagerly reading books such as Carlos Castañeda’s “Teachings of Don Juan.” A complex but marvelous experiment in writing and thinking. Was it anthropology? Was it pure fiction? Did it really matter? It stirred questions in us about the nature of reality. What really is? What isn’t? How the hell can we genuinely distinguish between them?

It was part of a cultural and spiritual quest that captivated many of us young Chicanos, most of whom were the first in their family to go to college and have the comparative luxury to indulge in such questioning. So, “Bless Me, Ultima” tugged at some of those same questions, but in a format and context wholly different from Castañeda’s “Teachings of Don Juan” and his subsequent books exploring those issues.

Original Art by Dennis Martinez

“Bless Me, Ultima” tells an engaging story of a Chicanito’s coming of age. It tells it in a context that is familiar and yet a bit mysterious to us all. Young Antonio wonders if understanding must come only at the loss of innocence. In his own way he ponders the sources of good and evil. He wonders about his place in the immediate world around him and in the larger universe. And it’s all told magically.

There’s a cast of characters including  a benign and powerful curandera, town locas perceived to be brujas, drunkards, priests and prostitutes. And there’s no end of page-turning violence and action. A good story is a good story. And “Bless Me, Ultima” is certainly that, but it is much more. It’s an exploration into tradition versus contemporary reality. An exploration of the lessons of history and the unforeseen potential of the future. It’s an exploration of love and trust and meaning. It takes place in rural New Mexico, a place where the life of the wild, beguiling llano contrasts with the stolid life of the domestic farm. That is its specific geographic and temporal context. But its tale is transcendent; it is universal.

When the novel opens we meet six-year-old Antonio who is on the cusp of a process, despite his young age, of seeking to understand the world around him. As we’ll soon discover, he is torn between several seeming extremes. His father is a descendant of vaqueros of the llano who are crafted from a culture of independence and wanderlust. His mother is from generations of people of the earth, farmers who are linked to the seasons and the bounty that comes their way from being custodians of the nourished and fertile land. Antonio is also somewhat torn between two separate spiritual ways of being: there is the European Catholic church that gives sustenance to his mother and there is the broad and mysterious spiritual perspective that is shown to him by his paternal grandmother, Ultima.

Which side is he on? Which paths should he follow?

Ultima, a curandera who heals people because of her connection to an indigenous way of being and understanding, comes to live with Antonio’s family when the novel begins. Gradually she teaches Antonio about “good and evil” from a perspective quite different from that of his mother’s Christian god. But to Ultima, all things can work in harmony, if one’s heart is open. Antonio’s mother wants him to grow up to be a Catholic priest. Ultima suggests that he will be “a man of learning.”

We follow Antonio as he begins to make his way, trying to understand the world.

Antonio sees darkness and violence all around him. Among other things he sees a man being killed. He tries to reconcile all of this, wondering how a beneficent god can allow such things. Ultima becomes his teacher and his protector. But Ultima herself eventually faces a very serious danger and Antonio tries to protect her.

It is a riveting, sensitively told tale. And, as I say, it still holds up – on many levels. As it happens, I recently also reread Harper Lee’s phenomenal “To Kill A Mockingbird” after first reading it thirty years ago or so. Like “Ultima,” it decidedly “holds up.” And, now that I’m a bit of an anciano, there was more to it than there was before. The book hadn’t changed; I had. I believe – at least I hope – that my own growth and my own experiences made the book resonate differently and more meaningfully than it had before. It’s because of the solid work that it is, a work that allows our experiences to reflect the characters, thoughts and experiences in the book. That’s what outstanding writing is about. And that’s definitely the case with “Bless Me, Ultima.” It’s a delight to read for the first time and a new, fulfilling challenge with every time you revisit it.

On the fortieth anniversary of its initial publication it remains a stellar literary achievement. But it’s also a sign of our political times that the misguided book burners masquerading as legislators and school officials of Arizona have taken it upon themselves to ban “Bless Me, Ultima” as somehow subversive and politically dangerous. Yeah, a lot has happened in our culture since I first read this marvelous book so many years ago.

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Luis Torres, a journalist and writer from

Pasadena, California, is at work on a

book that examines the 1968 East  Los

Angeles high school student walkouts.

Beautiful Maria of My Soul
by Oscar Hijuelos

Reviewed by Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.

www.ThelmaReyna.com.

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Oscar Hijuelos, acclaimed Cuban-American author of eight books, wrote Beautiful Maria of My Soul (2010) as a prequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1986). In the prequel, Hijuelos gives readers the back story of the supremely beautiful woman who broke musician Nestor Castillo’s heart in The Mambo Kings.  And what a back story it is!

The book covers 45 years, starting with Maria in Cuba at the age of 17 and ending with her in Miami, Florida, at the age of 62. In this span, we see the pre-Castro island nation in all its glory, beauty, and seediness. We learn about the decline of life for Cubans once Castro assumed power, and we follow Maria and her toddler daughter, Teresita, when they emigrate to America with hundreds of others and struggle to build a new life.

Author, Oscar Hijuelos

In this span, Hijuelos lays the seeds for his themes and slowly unwraps each one like gifts we anticipate but also dread: the fleeting nature and complexity of love, even true love; the losses and suffering that even the good endure; the seeming indifference and cruelty of God; the importance of memory in our lives; and the essential role of family.

Beautiful Maria Garcia y Sifuentes is a 17-year-old naïve, illiterate country girl living in extreme poverty in a tiny village in western Cuba. Her two brothers, teenaged sister, and beloved mother have one by one died untimely deaths, leaving her broken-hearted and alone with her sometimes-abusive, sometimes-tender father. In 1947, Maria decides that she must seek her independence and leaves the only world she’s ever known to travel to Havana, a bustling, frightening city filled with goodness, coarseness, and evil. She becomes a dancer in a rundown nightclub and alone must navigate the dangers and temptations of the city’s night life.

Her gift—extreme beauty of face and body that draws barrages of attention—is likewise a curse. She tires of men trying to seduce her, trying to impose their coarseness upon her, and wonders if it’s possible to find a good man who can love her for more than beauty. She appreciates her gifts, however, and uses them to advance her career, rising to be the featured dancer in the club and working as a model.

Virginal Maria eventually takes up with an older man, Ignacio, who has a shady reputation as a small-time gangster but who is generous with his attention and money and provides her with respectability and stability. Like her father, however, he sometimes beats and denigrates her; and Maria decides to leave him. During a violent argument with Ignacio, she meets Nestor Castillo, a poetic, soulful, handsome musician who rescues her from Ignacio’s rage. Nestor’s humility and saintliness, as well as his physical beauty, immediately appeal to Maria; and she and Nestor soon become lovers. Their passion is intense and endless, depicted by the author in highly graphic, explicit detail.

Nestor, for all his talents in and out of bed, is poor and simple. His gifts—besides the anatomical ones well-documented by Hijuelos—lie in his songwriting and his undying commitment to Maria. But Maria, accustomed to luxury after living with Ignacio, can only imagine a life of poverty if she marries Nestor, who proposes to her repeatedly, each time being rebuffed. Although enamored of Nestor sexually, she is not sure she truly loves him, plus her financial comfort trumps life with Nestor. She thus returns to Ignacio, and the broken-hearted Nestor eventually leaves with his older brother, Cesar Castillo, for New York to start a new life. (The Mambo Kings depicts the brothers’ lives from this point forward.)

Maria takes pride in her rise from poverty and learns to read and write. As the years pass, her father, her last surviving family member, dies. Maria feels the loss of this last link with family very deeply. She also misses Nestor and realizes that she made a mistake in rejecting him. He writes her wistful letters of undying love, and reminds her of a song he’s perfecting in her honor: “Beautiful Maria of My Soul.” Regarding Ignacio, she discovers several secret affairs. Each loss oozes a layer of hardness on Maria’s soul. Once devout, she now questions God and mocks him. She realizes that even love is “ephemeral and useless….like air.” The sweet, soft-hearted girl has become taciturn, critical, and jaded.

Maria comes to believe that having her own child will bring her happiness, and she wants Nestor to be the father. Although she learns that Nestor is now married and has two children, she believes Nestor still loves her, since he’s been writing letters to her since his departure to New York. She travels to New York to reunite with him and, hopefully, to be impregnated by him. Despite great qualms, Nestor agrees to meet Maria secretly and proceeds to ravage her like in old times. What happens after this secret reunion changes their lives forever and leads to great tragedy for both of them.

Hijuelos’ book is beautifully poetic in language and insights. He writes in a conversational style, filled with Cuban dialect, slang, and code-switching (alternating between English and Spanish), which makes his writing full of color and authenticity. Hijuelos creates memorable characters who are imperfect, who fill us with admiration and with revulsion. We can admire the tender-hearted Maria, but we can’t admire the young woman who chose money over love, or who, at the age of 50 and 60, is vain and largely unemotional. Nestor’s modesty as a young Cuban fills our hearts with respect, but his sexual foray as a married man shows his weakness. Still, these characters are human, and we can relate to them and learn from them.

Hijuelos has been criticized in the past for filling his books with too much sex, oftentimes in crude depictions. In this book, he can indeed be faulted for this. Although some sex scenes are described in evocative, literary language, the book could easily be reduced by dozens of pages with the elimination of redundant erotica that sometimes seems gratuitous. Hijueolos can also be faulted for his relentless repetition of “beautiful” throughout the book, and his descriptions of Maria’s beauty so oversaturated to the point of caricature. Again, this book could have been slimmer and still have been convincing.

No book is perfect. The importance of Beautiful Maria of My Soul  is the author’s deft, unique treatment of how loss and unrequited love cut mercilessly into the human spirit; but also of how extremely humanizing family connectedness is, and how time and memories can mellow us out, if we remain open to possibilities, and we can find love in the most unexpected places. Hijuelos’ book expertly convinces us of this.

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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.

“Before the End, After the Beginning”
Written by Dagoberto Gilb
Published by Grove Press
195 Pages
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Reviewed by Luís Torres
luis.r.torres@charter.net

You would think a collection of short stories imbued with meditations on mortality and the fragile nature of human existence itself would be ponderous and moribund. But that is certainly not the case with the latest book by celebrated writer Dagoberto Gilb. He deftly explores such issues through the perspectives of intriguing, complex characters and masterful sculpting with words. And there is subtle humor and sly wordplay as well, all adding up to a satisfying and heartwarming experience for the reader.

Gilb’s new book is an engaging and thought-provoking collection of short stories titled “Before the End, After the Beginning.” It’s a pity the short story, in the view of many, is a dying art form. This collection is a lively counterpoint to that assertion. Here’s a recommendation: turn of the TV tonight, settle into a comfortable chair and spend a pleasurable evening with this little treasure trove of a book.

Los Angeles-born Dagoberto Gilb is a prolific writer who has won the accolades of critics for more than twenty years. He is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking novel “The Magic of Blood.” It has been regarded as a landmark of Chicano literature. But it is much more than that. It transcends any pigeonholing of genre. It is an example of fine literature – period.

His new book was created under somewhat unusual circumstances. About two years ago Gilb was knocked for a loop when he suffered a debilitating stroke. Dogged persistence helped him gradually recover. And the stories in this collection were crafted during the process of his recovery. That process informs some of these stories, sometimes overtly and sometimes a bit more subtly.

Dagboberto Gilb at La Plaza, Los Angeles, CA

The collection begins with a story titled “Please, Thank You.” It is told from the point of view of a young man in the hospital, feeling like a fish out of water. The character wakes up and finds he’s survived some severe medical trauma. He has trouble focusing. He has trouble remembering. He’s uncertain about the tactile world around him. He struggles as he tries to get his mind and his body to work in unison. And the tale is told in a style that befits the confused perspective of someone undergoing such an ordeal. It is all written in lower-case, with sparse and inconsistent punctuation. Again, a style that reflects the perspective of the character as he tries to make sense of his surroundings and sense of his own identity and personal history.
Gilb is quite the wordsmith. When he is at his best as a sculptor with words, he invites comparison to the lofty, magical prose of Salman Rushdie, among the most masterful of wordsmiths.

Another story in Gilb’s new collection weaves a tale of a man who goes to Mexico, seemingly with the intention of living out his final days. The gradual degeneration of his memory and ability to navigate the world around him evoke essential questions about who we are and what makes us what we are. Heady stuff. But woven in beautifully literate and accessible fashion. It is typical of the stories in this fine collection from one of this country’s most emerging innovative writers.
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Luis Torres, a journalist and writer from Pasadena, California, is at work on a book that examines the 1968 East Los Angeles high school student walkouts.

Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas

Down These Mean Streets, by Piri Thomas

Reviewed by Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.

www.ThelmaReyna.com .

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Two milestone events regarding the vaunted Puerto-Rican American author, Piri Thomas, occurred recently: He passed away last month in Northern California at the age of 83; and his iconic memoir, Down These Mean Streets, celebrated its 44th birthday. Though the first event breaks our hearts, and the second uplifts us, both attest to the longevity of Thomas’ artistry and influence and the wonderful luck our society has had in having Piri Thomas in our midst for all these years.

He died an icon, a proverbial legend in his own time. When Mean Streets was published in 1967, Thomas was one of the first modern-day Latinos to publish a book in English. He followed this break-out with two novels, a collection of short stories, and many poems, which he termed “wordsongs” and performed in varied venues all over the world. Yet it’s Mean Streets, which has been continuously in print, that cemented Thomas’ reputation as a literary tour de force and which readers most associate with Piri Thomas.

The book’s enduring fame is strongly warranted. One reviewer calls it “three books in one”: a coming-of-age saga chronicling the tragedies, crimes, and entanglements in Thomas’ life; an examination of the identity crisis many disadvantaged, mixed heritage youths undergo; and a story showing readers the bristling underside of Piri’s six years in the infamous Sing-Sing Prison of New York. Yet the author expertly weaves these separate themes together in his fast-paced, brutally authentic recreation of his difficult life growing up poor, half-Black, half-Puerto Rican, in an era of entrenched racism uglier than it now is.

The book begins in 1941, shortly before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and dragged the United States into World War II. To 12-year-old Piri in New York’s Harlem during the “Great Hunger called Depression,” the big “rumble” means that his father now has a decent job in an airplane factory. Otherwise: “Life in the streets didn’t change much. The bitter cold was followed by the sticky heat….War or peace—what difference did it really make?” Indeed, there is no distinction between Piri’s world before and after the great rumble, because his wars with his family, peers, racism, violence, drugs, crime, and society in general are just beginning and will disrupt his world for decades to come.

Author, Piri Thomas

Piri is a dark-skinned child in a bi-racial family where, other than his Black father, everyone is light-skinned and can pass for White. He frequently clashes with his father, who treats him with less love and harsher physical discipline than Piri’s four younger siblings receive. Convinced that his father doesn’t truly love him because of his darkness, Piri seeks solace in the streets, where he navigates the unwritten laws of survival in the barrio: Prove yourself to be tough. Survive beatings at the hands of racist kids and rival gang members. Fight back hard. Don’t rat out enemies, and be “cool.” Above all, be loyal to your friends, going with the flow, “playing it smooth.” He emphasizes: “Never punk out.”

So by the time Piri is 16, he belongs to a gang, beats up rivals, uses drugs, slugs a teacher, engages in homosexuality, and robs a store: all in the name of group loyalty. When his parents move the family to Long Island for “better opportunities,” Piri is reviled by racist schoolmates, and he drops out of school to return to Harlem, often living on the streets. It breaks his mother’s heart, but Piri yearns for the security of the old neighborhood. His life of crime in Harlem, filled as it is with hunger, poverty, drug addiction, and isolation from family, is nonetheless tied to camaraderie, to unconditional acceptance, and is a siren’s song Piri cannot resist. He states: “All for the feeling of belonging, for the price of being called ‘one of us.’ Isn’t there a better way to make the scene and be accepted on the street without having to go through hell?”

Piri undertakes a double-layered odyssey to discover who and what he is. On the one hand, it’s a physical journey that takes him, as a teenager, through the Deep South, around the world with the Merchant Marines, and back and forth between Harlem and Long Island. Outside of Harlem, he faces discrimination almost everywhere he goes. It seems that Piri seeks a place that will prove his worldview wrong, that he wants proof that his skin color does not determine his value as a human being. Unfortunately, in these journeys, Piri does not find such a place.

On another layer, his odyssey is highly personal and emotional as he struggles to believe that he is loved fully in his own family. He tries to reconcile his affection for his family with his bitterness toward their “whiteness.” It’s an eternal battle in his heart. His utter devotion to his mother opposes his antipathy toward his father, whom he sees as having rejected his own Black heritage with lies about his lineage. Piri’s hatred of Whites is profound, but this creates immense conflict. He says: “It was like hating Momma for the color she was and Poppa for the color he wasn’t.” He also states: “It ain’t just that I don’t wanna be what I’m supposed to be, it’s just that I’m fightin’ me and the whole goddamn world at the same time.” It’s one of the book’s great ironies that, as Piri struggles to win full acceptance from his family, he rejects them and ostracizes himself.

An armed robbery in which Piri shoots a police officer and is almost shot to death lands him in prison, where, with time, he finally finds himself—through carefully choosing his con friends, studying every major religion, attending classes, and eventually turning to writing. “Every day,” the author writes, “brought a painful awareness of the sweetness of being free and the horror of prison’s years going down the toilet bowl.” He sought “a release from the overpowering hatred against a society that makes canaries out of human beings.” In a heart-wrenching reflection, he adds: “I wanted to tell somebody I wanted to be somebody.” The peace and release he ultimately finds are an apt denouement to his evolution.

Down These Mean Streets is a gritty, unflinching portrayal of one man’s decline and renascence. Piri Thomas’ rat-a-tat-tat dialogue injects a sensual immediacy that grabs the reader and doesn’t loosen up. The economical descriptions of the people, good and bad, who cross Piri’s path and fill his life are true-to-life. But the greatest treasures between the book covers are Thomas’ thoughtful, lyrical passages that underscore his renown as a poet. When Piri most doubts himself, when he most fervently fishes in his mind for answers to his fears, when he most reflects upon his learnings in prison—and his realization that, as he says, “Nothing is run the same, nothing stays the same. You can’t make yesterday come back today”—the author’s poetic words soar through the air and lend a gentle, almost spiritual layer to his book.

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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 .

“Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California”

by Carlos Manuel Salomon

University of Oklahoma Press

223 pages

Luis Torres luis.r.torres@charter.net (626) 577-5664 March 10, 2011

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Have you ever visited the stately and ornate Pico House near Olvera Street, in the shadow of Los Angeles City Hall? Ever wondered what went on in that building and how it got its name? A new book about Pio Pico, the last governor of California during the Mexican era will inform you and will give you a fascinating glimpse into the early history of California, a time when it went from being part of Mexico to becoming the 31st state in the United States of America.

“Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California” by Carlos Manuel Salomon uses the intriguing and often quixotic life of Pio de Jesús Pico as a thread for revealing remarkable historical, political and cultural trends that marked California’s often rocky transition from Mexican to United States sovereignty. It is a tale of military heroism, political maneuvering, far reaching real estate shenanigans and efforts to overcome prejudice and injustice. All the tale needs is a comely heroine or a rescued damsel in distress. But it is history, not fiction. And it is a briskly-told tale in the hands of Salomon who has devoted years of study and painstaking research to the life of Pio Pico who was born in 1801 and died 1894.

Pio Pico was twice the governor of California during the Mexican era. He at times was a rebel leader of a militia. He was an astute politician. He was a rancher with vast tracts of property, including his beloved Whittier Ranchito. He was an aggressive, yet sometimes naive, businessman who built and ran the elegant, bustling hotel in downtown Los Angeles, which now bears his name and is a meticulously restored historical landmark — the Pico House.

Pio Pico first became governor of California in 1831 after he was among the leaders of a revolt against the incumbent Mexican governor. That popular rebellion swept him into office for the first time. During his second term as governor, in 1845 he “fought in vain to save California from the invading forces of the United States,” according to Salomon. It is Pico’s role in the transition of California that is particularly noteworthy historically.

Gov. Pio Pico and Wife

Relying on sources in both English and Spanish, Salomon chronicles the achievements that made Pico an extremely rich man and patriarch as well as the miscalculations that ultimately led to his political and financial downfall. Pico lost his huge Ranchito Whittier when he lost a series of lawsuits originally filed by adversarial investors and businessmen. In his old age he was left penniless.

Salomon concludes that Pico’s losses in court resulted from demonstrably false testimony and legal underhandedness. Something other Californios (original Mexican settlers) encountered in the transition. “But along the way, Pico also made some unwise business transactions and his ultimate demise was more associated with corrupt and cunning individuals who conspired to destroy the old governor than a systematic process aimed at destroying all Californios,” he writes in “Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California.” Pico died a pauper, but when he was at the top of his game, he had been undeniably been a wealthy and influential force in California.

California, of course, had long been a territory of New Spain and then of Mexico. Mexico achieved its independence from Spain in 1821, a time when a young Pio Pico was making his way as a young man in southern California. Twenty-five years later Mexico and the United States (which was caught up in the intoxicating jingoistic wave of “Manifest Destiny”) went to war. When the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848) was over, Mexico ceded nearly half of its territory to the United States. California was perhaps the biggest prize.

Pio Pico was governor at that time and although he and other “Californios” failed in their efforts to forestall the acquisition of California by the “gringos,” he became, for the most part, a force of peaceful reconciliation in the years of the transition. Salomon writes, “Pico was able to continue investing in real estate well into the 1870s and his survival as an important economic force following the U.S.-Mexican War, his centrality in the politics of early California, and his place among Californios help illuminate the larger political, economic and racial transformation taking place in nineteenth-century California.”

Pio Pico was of African and mestizo heritage, as were many of the settlers in early California. He worked to mitigate some of the harsh policies and practices that subjugated the indigenous population, including Gabrielinos, or Tongvas as they called themselves. His own life was a reflection of the changes — both good and bad — that occurred in the transition from Mexican to American rule in California, as Salomon ably demonstrates.

The book is fundamentally the life story of an interesting and historically significant individual. However, Salomon generally uses Pico as the vehicle for looking at the events of his era. One book can’t cover every issue, of course, but the book might have been enhanced with a closer look at the role the church, the military and the state played in subjugating the indigenous populations of California. Pio Pico was, after all, an eyewitness to that phenomenon. And it is an important, if painful, chapter of early California history.

You might want to consider these historical threads next time you visit the stately Pico House in downtown Los Angeles.

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Luis Torres, a journalist and writer from Pasadena, California, is at work on a book that examines the 1968 East Los Angeles high school student walkouts.

“The Chinese in Mexico 1882-1940″
University of Arizona Press
(www.uapress.arizona.edu)
Roberto Chao Romero

Reviewed by Luis Torres
luis.r.torres@charter.net

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The first “illegal immigrants” to cross into the United States from Mexico weren’t Mexicans. They were Chinese. A new book by a professor of Chicano studies at UCLA reveals that and other salient and startling anecdotes about borderland history.

In “The Chinese in Mexico 1882-1940” Robert Chao Romero examines a little known realm of United States-Mexico social history. It’s a safe bet that very few Americans know about the rich, intriguing (and sometimes unsettling) story of Mexican Chinese.

It is a social history that is joined at the hip with the story of Chinese Americans. There was a substantial wave of immigration from China to Mexico in the late nineteenth century. The social and cultural consequences of that wave of immigration still reverberate in Mexico and the United States today. As a minor, benign example of that, ever wonder why the best Chinese restaurants in North America are arguably not in San Francisco but in Mexicali? It’s one remnant of a long legacy of a borderland phenomenon of Chinese immigration and transplanted culture.

There are parallels between the way Chinese immigrants were treated in the United States and the way they were treated in Mexico. And there are historical parallels between the way Chinese — as newcomers — were treated and the way in which many Mexican newcomers to the United States were treated. Often, it is an unpleasant story. But it is part of our collective experience. And the Chinese in the U.S. and in Mexico have endured, owing to their perseverance, resourcefulness and strong sense of community.

The Chinese in the United States, of course, provided valuable service in building the transcontinental railroad. The Chinese were encouraged to come here for their cheap labor. There were organized commercial recruitment campaigns, championed by the governments of both the United States and China. But anti-Chinese resentment soon built to a crescendo in the late 1880s. Finally the U.S. sought to ban all Chinese immigration when it passed the nefarious Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It made it illegal for Chinese to come to the United States.

But the turmoil and landlessness in such regions as Guangdong (Canton) still forced Chinese immigrants to seek new opportunities outside China. So, many shifted their target from California to Mexico. Streams of immigrants poured into Mexico, beginning in 1882.

Some immigrants intended to seek their fortunes in Mexico, but many used the passage to Mexico as a stop on their clandestine way into the United States. Romero argues that those Chinese, who paid smugglers to get them into the United States and used a variety of sophisticated ruses to enter the U.S., became the first “illegal immigrants” making their way into this country.

Romero writes, “Unknown to most people, the Chinese were the first ‘undocumented immigrants’ from Mexico, and they created the first organized system of human smuggling from Mexico to the United States. As part of their efforts to circumvent the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Laws, Chinese immigrants created a vast transnational smuggling business that involved agents and collaborators in China, Mexico, Cuba and various cities throughout the United States.”

History repeats itself as today we see Mexican undocumented immigrants determined to make their way across the border, often at great risk to their lives.

And history repeats itself in the manner in which anti-Chinese sentiment lead to violent persecution of Chinese — in both Mexico and the United States.

Throughout their history in the Americas, Chinese immigrants were victims of virulent racism and violent attacks. It is a shameful part of Los Angeles history that saw lynchings and wanton murders of Chinese. The most egregious example of that is the infamous Los Angeles massacre of October 24, 1871.

As quoted in Jean Pfaelzer’s seminal book “Driven Out,” the “Alta California” newspaper of the period printed this account: “Twelve hours ago…fifteen staring corpses hung ghastly in the moonlight, while seven or eight others, mutilated, torn and crushed, lay in our streets, all of them Chinamen.”

Actually, when the tally was complete, it was revealed that seventeen Chinese were lynched and two others were knifed to death on the night of October 24, 1871. Pfaelzer writes: “Their mangled bodies were found hanging from a wooden awning over a carriage shop, from the sides of two prairie schooners parked around the corner, from a gutter spout, and from a beam across the wide gate of a lumberyard. One of the victims wore no trousers and a finger had been severed from his left hand.”

A hostile lynch mob attacked the residents of L.A.’s Chinatown, which was then located where Union Station stands today. It was the culmination of growing anti-Chinese hysteria. The Chinese were accused of spreading crime and disease. They were accused of “taking our jobs” and of unfair competition in business.

Familiar accusations aimed at Mexicans by Anglos in the years to come.

But anti-Chinese bigotry reared its ugly head not only in the United States, but in Mexico as well. Romero documents the pernicious case of the Torreon Massacre of 1911 in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila. As in the United States, racist hatred of the Chinese was growing. Romero writes, “The most horrendous incident of Mexican subaltern violence perpetrated against Chinese immigrants during the early revolutionary years took place in the city of Torreon, Coahuila, on May 14 and 15, 1911.”

More than 300 Chinese were summarily and brutally murdered by soldiers of the Mexican revolution. Their only “crime” was that they were Chinese. With meticulous research, Romero unearths documents and contemporaneous accounts that name names and provide gruesome details. Romero writes, “The massacre of Torreon was the worst act of violence committed against any Chinese diasporic community of the Americas during the twentieth century.”

All part of a legacy of xenophobia and intolerance.

Not a pretty picture, of course. But it is part of our collective history. And it is something we should know about and bear in mind to help us keep contemporary issues of immigration and “otherness” in perspective.

One significant difference between the Chinese experience in Mexico and in the United States involves intermarriage. Eventually in Mexico many Chinese men married Mexican women. Families of “chino/mexicanos” thrive in Mexico today. By contrast, because of strictly enforced anti-miscegenation laws, mixed race marriages were almost non-existent in the U.S.

Robert Chao Romero ably provides the documented evidence of the treatment of Chinese immigrants. His prose doesn’t have the flair of others who have written memorable social histories, such as Jean Pfaelzer and the unparalleled storyteller Simon Winchester, who makes social history come alive with his finely tuned narrative touches. Yet,“The Chinese in Mexico” provides us with a valuable look into relatively unknown, and significant, chapters of our borderland history.

It is an important milestone in the field, and could serve as a catalyst for further study and illumination about the Chinese in the Americas.

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Luis Torres, a journalist and writer from Pasadena, California, is at work on a book that examines the 1968 East Los Angeles high school student walkouts.