Chicano Identity in Literature

History

When historians and other scholars began to assess the impact of the Chicano Renaissance of the 1960s and early 1970s, they soon realized that the social and political upheaval of the time also produced an explosion of artistic creation that needed to be understood. Literary works in particular became the subject of intense scrutiny because for many, they held the secret to understanding the Chicano experience in that age of growing awareness. The process of discovering Chicano literature, to a large extent, also became a process of defining Chicano identity.

The history of Chicano identity in literature can trace its beginnings to José Antonio Villarreal’s novel Pocho (1959), which is generally regarded as the first Chicano novel. In it, Richard Rubio, the protagonist, undergoes the rites of passage that all children and adolescents experience in the process of maturation. Paralleling this transition is another one featuring a movement away, by the protagonist, from the Mexican world of his father, who had been a colonel in Pancho Villa’s army during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Richard is symbolically transformed into a pocho (Spanish for “rotten,” used pejoratively to describe someone of Mexican descent who has adopted Anglo customs and values). Richard occupies, as one born in the United States to his Mexican parents, a new identity, one based on an American cultural landscape. In Pocho, Richard discovers that cultural identity is no longer simply an extension of Mexican nationality or of the American mainstream.

The rather confusing and sometimes conflicting tendencies of Richard’s identity result from his being Mexican, being American, and being neither of those things. These tendencies affect Richard’s concept of identity in Pocho. These issues continue to be an important part of the Chicano experience. Rudolfo Gonzales’s I Am Joaquín (1967), the epic poem of the Chicano Renaissance, takes the cultural confusion first expressed in Pocho and attempts to resolve it in the person of Joaquín, a collective hero who represents the Chicano people.

Pocho and I Am Joaquín ushered in a variety of dynamic Chicano voices. Memorable voices of the Chicano Renaissance, such as Alurista, Luis Omar Salinas, Gloria Pérez, and Abelardo Delgado brought a greater understanding of the dimension of the Chicano experience. Although these writers began by dealing with personal questions about their existence, they also strived to establish a context for their roots in a historical and cultural Chicano reality.

1970s

The 1970s witnessed an explosion of literary production that firmly established the foundation of Chicano identity in literature. It began in 1970, with Ricardo Sánchez’s book of poetry Canto y grito mi liberación, Luis Omar Salinas’s Crazy Gypsy, and a new edition of Villarreal’s Pocho. Then, in 1971, Alurista published Floricanto en Aztlán, a book of poetry that became a classic. It speaks about the American Southwest as Aztlán, the mythical place of origin of the Aztecs. The book affirmed the Southwest as a geographical home and a literary space for the Chicano. Also in 1971, Tomás Rivera published And the Earth Did Not Part, a landmark novel about migrant workers from Southern Texas who harvest the crops for the rest of the world. Rivera’s work brought the farmworker, an important part of Chicano society, into the literary landscape. Finally, Luis Miguel Valdez published a collection of plays, Actos, which had been written and performed for César Chávez’s farmworkers’ movement in California. The plays were used as teaching tools that graphically explain the plight of the Chicano underclass and the social, historical, and economic reasons for that plight.

In 1972, Rudolfo A. Anaya published his first novel, Bless Me, Ultima, which brings a powerful message about the land and how those who work it and live on it are affected by its unchanging character. That same year, Antonio Castañeda Shular, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, and Joseph Sommers published Literatura Chicana: Texto y Contexto (Chicano literature: text and context), an anthology that received immediate recognition in Chicano letters. In 1973, Rolando Hinojosa published Estampas del valle y otras obras-Sketches of the Valley and Other Works, a humorous novel that presents a series of sketches about the Spanish-speaking communities along the Rio Grande River in Southern Texas.

After Pocho, Villarreal published his second and third novels The Fifth Horseman (1974) and Clemente Chacón (1979), which seek to integrate the epic experience of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 into the Chicano cultural landscape. Anaya’s second and third novels, Heart of Aztlán (1976) and Tortuga (1979), complete the trilogy begun by Bless Me, Ultima and deepen the discussion of Chicano identity by alluding to the pre-Columbian Aztec world and its homeland of Aztlán. The literature of Chicano experience developed its own mythos.

During the 1980s, the important writers of the 1970s continued to produce and were joined by new voices, including Nash Candelaria, Arturo Islas, Jr., Eliud Martínez, and Carlos Morton. Chicano identity in literature took an important turn with the arrival of Chicana writers at the forefront of the literary stage. They brought new points of view that enriched the Chicano perspective and effectively changed the tone of the discussion about identity to include gender and the problems in the relationship between Chicanos and Chicanas.

Chicana Writers During the 1980s

Among the many women who came forward in the 1980s were Ana Castillo, Denise Elia Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, and Mary Helen Ponce. Castillo published her first book of poetry in 1976, but her first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), defined her to the public. The novel is structured as a series of letters from one woman to another. The letters delve into the love and gender conflicts between Chicanos and Chicanas. It is an indictment of Chicano men’s inability to treat women fairly. Chávez is a playwright who also writes poetry and prose. She first published a play in 1973. Her first novel, The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), however, attracted special attention because of its delicate prose and the portrayal of a woman’s developing identity outside the traditional order.

Cisneros is a poet who turned to narrative to describe the life of an adolescent girl in The House on Mango Street (1983), a novel that received excellent critical reviews. Mary Helen Ponce published her first book of short stories in 1983; her first major work is another collection of short stories, Taking Control (1987), which features women as victims, then survivors, then people who, at the end of their stories, are able to take control. This message is confirmed in her first novel, The Wedding (1989), which sees life in a Chicano neighborhood through the eyes of a pregnant bride-to-be. The novel is an amusing rendition of traditional customs and mores that hinder women’s development.

1990s

The 1990s have witnessed an expansion on the themes that have shaped Chicano identity. These themes include Aztlán as a Chicano homeland and its connection to the pre-Columbian past, the past and present relationship of the Chicano with the Mexican, and the relationship of the Chicano to the American mainstream, to the land, and to the Catholic church. Chicano literature of the 1990s also continues to explore the relationship between the Chicano and the Chicana. The last theme sometimes involves a painful reevaluation of cultural values.

Anaya’s contribution to this expansion has come, among other things, in the form of three novels, Alburquerque (1992), which explores the Indo-Hispanic genealogy of the city (beginning with the correction in the spelling of its name), Zia Summer (1995), a novel that looks for clues in Chicano culture to unravel its mystery plot, and Jalamanta (1996), a novel that conveys a message about the apocalyptic destruction of a mythical world that desperately needs to return to the path of the sun. The implication is that the mythical world could very well be this one.

Castillo returned with two novels, Sapogonia (1990) and So Far from God (1993), which reverse the patriarchal structure of valuing men over women and create a new universe. Castillo’s collection of feminist-oriented poetry, My Father Was a Toltec (1995), and a collection of essays, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (1994), delineates her feminist philosophy and helps explain the themes in her literary production.

Chávez’s long novel Face of an Angel (1990) depicts the life of a waitress who makes the best of a bad situation and redefines the concept of service, eliminating its demeaning context. Cisneros published, in 1991, a book of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, which deal with how love is idealized by women, who are subsequently disappointed. Mary Helen Ponce reveals life in her neighborhood with her family in Hoyte Street (1994), an autobiography that reads like a novel.

Chicano writers have built an awareness of identity for Chicanos that begins in the pre-Columbian past and continues in a present that is filled with male and female voices. In the process they have built a body of Chicano literature.

Implications for Identity into the 2000s

The history of Chicano literature as well as current-day offerings reveal an expanding search for identity that go hand-in-hand with the Chicano’s increasing sense of self-awareness amidst discrimination, culture, and history. Villarreal’s Pocho provides a beginning by delineating the new context of what it is to be Chicano. Gonzales’ I Am Joaquín connects the Indo-Mestizo world to contemporary Chicano reality. Anaya and his contemporaries orchestrate history, land, and people into a worldview and a new literary landscape. Finally, women writers such as Castillo, Chávez, Cisneros, and Ponce bring the feminine point of view, the plight of Chicanas, and their insistence on change into focus. The Chicana issues represent the latest in the expansion of Chicano awareness and identity.

Well into the 2000s, Chicano writers continued to create literature that explores identity, belonging, and ancestry and much of which attempts to make present-day connections to the past. Domingo Martinez writes of coming of age in a border town along the Texas/Mexico line in his memoir The Boy Kings of Texas (2012), which was also a Pushcart Prize nominee. Maceo Montoya humorously critiques US policies surrounding deportation in his novel The Deportation of Wopper Barriza (2014). Continuing the theme of displacement and belonging is a memoir by Rayna Grande, The Distance Between Us (2012), which chronicles the life of an undocumented alien living in extreme poverty in the United States and growing to become a respected writer and professional. The book was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Mouth Filled with Night (2014) is a collection of poems by Rodney Gomez and explores life and coming of age in a border town and presents vivid imagery of Mexican and pre-Columbian heritage and mythology.

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