Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana o Identity (CMAS History, Culture, and Society Series)

brown gumshoes

HISTORY, CULTURE, AND SOCIETY SERIES CENTER FOR MEXICAN AMERICAN STUDIES (CMAS) UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

b y r a l p h e . ro d r i g u e z

BROWN GUMSHOES DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE SEARCH FOR CHICANA/O IDENTITY

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2005 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2005 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). L I B R A RY O F CONGRESS C ATA L O G I N G - I N - P U B L I C AT I O N D ATA

Rodriguez, Ralph E. (Ralph Edward) Brown gumshoes : detective fiction and the search for Chicana/o identity / by Ralph E. Rodriguez.—1st ed. p. cm. — (History, culture, and society series) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-292-70696-0 (cl. : alk. paper) — isbn 0-292-71255-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Detective and mystery stories, American—History and criticism. 2. American fiction—Mexican American authors— History and criticism. 3. Mexican Americans—Intellectual life. 4. Mexican Americans in literature. 5. Group identity in literature. I. Title. II. Series. ps374.d4r63 2005 813'.08720986872—dc22 2005014505

With love, gratitude, respect, and honor for my parents, Sophie and Gumaro Rodriguez, Jr., without whom this work would not have been possible. IN MEMORIAM

gumaro rodriguez, jr. (1930–2000)

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CONTENTS

Foreword by José E. Limón ix Acknowledgments xiii introduction Alienated Eye/I:

The Emergence of the Chicana/o Detective Novel 1 chapter 1

Rolando Hinojosa’s kcdt Series: Instrumental Rationality and the Advance of Late Capitalism in Belken County 14

chapter 2

Michael Nava’s Henry Rios Series: You Can’t Step in the Same Río Twice 34

chapter 3

Lucha Corpi’s Gloria Damasco Series: Detecting Cultural Memory and Chicanidad 55

chapter 4

Manuel Ramos’s Luis Montez Series: ¿Quién soy yo? Crises of Identity and Culture 78

chapter 5

Rudolfo Anaya’s Sonny Baca Series: Governing the Self in a Sea of Change 106

conclusion

Looking Back, Pointing Forward 125 Notes 141 Works Cited 161 Index 175

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FOREWORD

I miss Jimmy Smits and Esai Morales on the television series NYPD Blue. So there. At the outset, let me confess that as an academic, I commit the unpardonable sin—for academics—of watching television other than PBS. I suppose I could say that I watch it sparingly (that part would be true), but perhaps only as a function of the many professional and familial demands on my time. Perhaps secretly I long to watch more, perhaps as other people like me may also wish to indulge in popular culture such as, shall we say, detective novels. Ralph Rodriguez confesses to the latter, but as we shall see in this book, his seeming ‘‘indulgence’’ has produced rich intellectual dividends even as it is evident that he enjoys the genre. The fact is that I simply find some programs entertaining, and of these, the police procedural NYPD Blue is a favorite, although somewhat less so since Jimmy Smits, who played Detective Bobby Simone, and Esai Morales, who portrayed squad commander Lt. Tony Rodriguez, left the show and have not really been replaced. But now, informed by Ralph Rodriguez’s brilliant readings and overall interpretation of his chosen Latino and Latina detective novelists, I gain better purchase on why I, as a Latino, miss Bobby Simone and Tony Rodriguez. In part, I miss them because the drama’s central hero, Detective Andy Sipowicz, has no one to watch his back, to be a close friend, someone who can understand and tolerate his complicated, world-weary self even as the characters together confront the world’s vices in New York City. Now, after reading the work that follows, I think that I really miss

them because I sense that as Latinos they played a crucial double role— for Sipowicz, which is also to say in support of a besieged, conflicted, but fundamentally good version of America, and against the degradations of the world. I do not mean simply that these characters represent Latinos in a ‘‘positive’’ light, although they do. Neither do I mean that the actors played their roles ‘‘culturally’’ with all sorts of affirmative references to Latino ethnicity, nor that the characters come off as Latin lovers. They really do not, although their (handsome) Latino phenotypes and slight—some might say charming—accents are certainly there. Only after reading what Ralph Rodriguez has to tell us in this marvelous book about Latino and Latina detectives, could I formulate somewhat more clearly what I found so compelling about the Latino characters on NYPD Blue. For Rodriguez, Chicana/o writers such as Rudolfo Anaya, Lucha Corpi, Rolando Hinojosa, Michael Nava, and Manuel Ramos have used the detective novel as a powerful tool for exploring what it might mean to be Latino and Latina in the twenty-first century. ‘‘The novels themselves’’, he tells us, ‘‘are reflections not only on criminal mysteries, but also queries into the mystery of identity.’’ Identity is a mystery in our time because older sources of such identity—as farm-workers, barrio proletarians, ethnic nationalists, and the food, festivities, rituals, language that once distinguished ethnicity— are no longer as viable. This is not to say that such sources of identity are absent in the lives of all of these detectives, including Bobby Simone and Tony Rodriguez. But they are not foregrounded as such even as we fully sense that Simone and Rodriguez are Latinos and that in their struggle against the world’s corruptions, they necessarily have to contend with and carry the historical load of domination that still falls upon Latinos and Latinas in the United States. But they have now (over)come and come to terms with this inheritance of social domination by exhibiting for us a struggle against the world’s largely capitalist corruptions with demonstrations of keen intelligence, professional competence, moral strength, and comradeship with the socially afflicted even while recognizing in world-weary wisdom that the struggle will never cease, and that they may give up their lives in the hard bargain—as indeed happened to Bobby Simone. In their efforts to solve the mysteries of criminality, which is also to say the larger criminality of our society, these detectives offer us another, more complicated and far more interesting model for identity,

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for conducting our lives as Latinos and Latinas in the twenty-first century, and for this lesson critically well-taught we are grateful to Ralph Rodriguez. I commend him to you in what follows. —josé e. limón MODY C. BOATRIGHT REGENTS PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN AND ENGLISH LITERATURE DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR MEXICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

FOREWORD

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Unlike the celebrated private eye who often goes it alone against seemingly insurmountable odds, I have benefited greatly from the support of friends, colleagues, family members, and various institutions in the writing of this book. I am delighted to have the opportunity to thank them. I am, of course, delighted that Sophie and Gumaro Rodriguez Jr. brought me into this world and have seen me through it. I couldn’t have asked for a better set of parents. The loss of my father in 2000 was a devastating blow. Rod and Sophie, I thank you for your inspiration, encouragement, and example. For the bonds and support of a loving family, I am grateful to Tina, John, David, J. C., Stacy, and Stephanie. This project benefited from the research and writing time provided by a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. José David Saldívar generously served as my mentor for the tenure of the fellowship, giving me, as usual, insightful feedback on my work. I thank the departments of English and Comparative Literature, the College of Liberal Arts, and Dean Welch at Penn State University for the institutional support that allowed me to accept the Wilson/Mellon fellowship. I also thank the department of English and Center for the Humanities at Oregon State University, where, as an internal fellow, I began mapping some of the preliminary ideas for this project in 1999. Numerous colleagues at Penn State and Oregon State have given me valuable feedback at differing stages in the writing of this book and through the publication process. For taking the time to do so I thank Michael Bérubé, Don Bialostosky, Robert Caserio, Rich Doyle, Keith Gilyard, Henry Giroux, Erlinda Gonzales-Berry, Kathryn Hume, Jane

Juffer, Djelal Kadir, Shu Kuge, Vincent Lankewish, Jon Lewis, Laura Lomas, Janet Lyon, Jeff Nealon, Aldon Nielsen, Michael Oriard, David Robinson, Susan Searls Giroux, Alice Sheppard, Deborah Starr, Cathy Steblyk, Evan Watkins, and Paul Youngquist. In addition, I would like to thank all of my colleagues in English and Comparative Literature for their continued support and encouragement. As I presented a number of ideas that appear in this book in my classes and seminars, my undergraduate and graduate students have been wonderfully receptive, delightfully charming, and pleasantly pushy. I am indebted to Holly Flint and Tasha Cortez for invaluable research assistance. I wish to thank my friends and colleagues at other institutions who have encouraged me and offered their insights on my work. First and foremost, I want to acknowledge Shawn Michelle Smith, who over the past several years has endured hour-long conversations about this project and the publishing process. She has consistently offered her keen observations with great enthusiasm, even after the twentieth ‘‘But what if . . . ?’’ Thanks, Shawn. I am grateful to Jo Nutter for the time and energy she graciously gave to see me through numerous personal and intellectual pursuits. She made the lonely and arduous tasks of research and writing fulfilling activities. Also generous with their time and support have been Joe Masco, Mary Pat Brady, Loren Glass, and Juan Alonzo. I don’t think I will ever be able to fully repay Diana Damer for her invaluable expertise. She did work that ‘‘all the king’s horses and all the king’s men’’ could never have pulled off. Similarly, Heather Scott has been a force for good in my life. Her wisdom, advice, compassion, and empathy have curative powers beyond compare. David Gamson and Mark Adams’s friendships have been life sustaining. They have spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours drinking coffee, talking about ideas, and providing much-needed company in the cafés around State College. I couldn’t have pulled this project off without them. Along those lines, here’s to Saint’s Café and the wonderful baristas there who serve up an endless supply of caffeine. For more than a decade now, José Limón has championed and challenged my ideas. His scholarship has continuously refigured the field of Chicana/o studies, and I have benefited greatly from having had the opportunity to study under him at the University of Texas at Austin. It has been my great privilege to have Theresa May as my editor. Her accessibility and enthusiasm for the project have made this publishBROWN GUMSHOES

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ing experience a delightful one. I also thank Laura Young Bost, Leslie Doyle Tingle, and Allison Faust for help with getting the manuscript in its final form. Thanks as well are due to Mary LaMotte for her careful copyediting and patience with my numerous queries. In addition, I extend my gratitude to the many employees at UT Press whom I may never know by name but whose work has contributed to the production of this book. The comments and suggestions from the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript have helped me strengthen and clarify my arguments. I know reading and offering feedback on a book-length manuscript is a time-consuming process. I thank you for the care and time you put into Brown Gumshoes. Finally, as academic researchers, we spend lots of time in libraries, home offices, and at the computer. Nevertheless, one has to get away from those environs from time to time in order to preserve one’s body and sanity. My escape was the gym. At East Coast Health and Fitness, I managed to strike up numerous friendships that sustained me over the long haul of working on this book. For their good cheer and encouragement, I thank Kerry, Jamie, George, and Lucy Bestwick; Teri Bealer, Kristi Carver; Christy Curtorillo; and Michelle Dimidio. Even in a list of acknowledgments as detailed as this, I have, no doubt, inadvertently left out folks who deserve my gratitude. Please consider that an unintentional oversight, not an ungrateful heart. And know that I thank you for your support. A much different and shorter version of chapter 2 appeared as ‘‘A Poverty of Relations: On Not ‘Making Familia from Scratch,’ But Scratching Familia’’ in Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/o Sexualities, edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba (New York: Palgrave Press, 2003). I thank Palgrave Press for the permission to reprint that essay. Chapter 3 appeared in a slightly different form as ‘‘Cultural Memory and Chicanidad: Detecting History, Past and Present, in Lucha Corpi’s Gloria Damasco Series’’ in Contemporary Literature 43.1 (2002). I am grateful to the University of Wisconsin Press for permission to reprint that article.

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brown gumshoes

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introduction

ALIENATED EYE/I THE EMERGENCE OF THE CHICANA/O DETECTIVE NOVEL

She just wants to lay in bed all night reading Raymond Chandler. —j i m c a r r o l l , ‘‘ t h r e e s i s t e r s ’’ Self-alienation is the source of all degradation as well as, on the contrary, the basis of all true evaluation. The first step will be a look inward, an isolating contemplation of our self. Whoever remains standing here proceeds only halfway. The second step must be an active look outward, an autonomous, determined observation of the outer world. —n ova l i s , b l u¨ t e n s t a u b

Jim Carroll’s song ‘‘Three Sisters’’ makes explicit the truism that popular culture provides pleasure. Miranda does not want to trifle with the needs of the boys who pursue her. Rather she wants to kick back, relax, and cuddle up with Mr. Chandler, a bedtime pursuit much more appealing than the tough, lonely, urban world outside her door. According to John G. Cawelti, literary escapism as such fulfills two psychological needs, a flight from boredom and a quest for order (Adventure 15–16). We need to be able to escape the ennui of our lives and be reassured that no matter how tough it gets out there, the world is ultimately knowable and rational. While the pleasure of popular fiction tempts us to get lost in the diversion of the text, we, as critics, must remember that these novels speak powerfully to the moment in which they were written. They are cultural commodities that have much to tell us about the historical, social, and political milieu in which they emerged. As Martin Priestman asserts, ‘‘Present day detective novels ask to be treated as

serious books in their own right, rather than as the ‘escape from literature’ they were once expected to be’’ (173).1 Yet we can have our pleasure and our criticism too; they are not mutually exclusive.2 Detective novels can be entertaining and delightful reads, but they also answer questions about the writers who produce them and the cultures that consume them. ‘‘Nowhere more than in its popular literary genres,’’ maintains Dennis Porter, ‘‘are the ‘myths’ of a culture more visible’’ (120).3 The emergence and proliferation of the Chicana/o detective novel in the last two decades illuminate how Chicana/os grapple with feminism, homosexuality, familia, masculinity, mysticism, the nationalist subject, and U.S.-Mexico border relations. Thus, at the very core of the Chicana/o detective novel are ‘‘myths’’ central to how Chicana/os imagine themselves and their worlds. Since Rolando Hinojosa published the first Chicana/o detective novel, Partners in Crime (1985), the corpus of Chicana/o detective fiction has burgeoned into some twenty-odd detective novels written by five different authors (Rudolfo Anaya, Lucha Corpi, Rolando Hinojosa, Michael Nava, and Manuel Ramos).4 Despite this dramatic increase in cultural production, scholars have heretofore paid scant attention to the analysis of these novels. Brown Gumshoes, the first comprehensive study of the Chicana/o detective novel, examines the Chicana/o subject in the post-nationalist period (roughly the early 1980s to the present) in order to historicize and understand how and why Chicana/os construct the identities they do. These detective novels demonstrate the emergence of new discourses of identity, politics, and cultural citizenship 5 that speak to the shifting historical moment in which Chicana/os have found themselves since the demise of the nationalist politics of the Chicana/o Movement (ca. 1965–1975).6 In contrast to the 1960s and 1970s, when Chicana/os sought to solidify a unified identity to effect social change, the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s have been about understanding the protean nature of identity, power, and politics. Moreover, I contend that it is no coincidence that Chicana/o writers turned to the detective novel at this historical juncture—the form has a number of features to recommend it as a vehicle for understanding the Chicana/o subject in the post-nationalist period. I reflect on why the detective form takes hold of Chicana/o writers when it does and what specific features make it a productive form for grappling with post-nationalism. Why have Chicana/o writers come to the detective story, a form developed in the mid-nineteenth century, so late in the twentieth cenBROWN GUMSHOES

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tury? One of the most plausible reasons Chicana/os did not write detective novels prior to the mid-1980s was an anxiety over the form itself. Chicana/o writers were already struggling against a publishing house preconception that their writing was too narrow, that it only spoke to a small minority of people in the United States. Indeed, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, mainstream presses largely overlooked Chicana/o authors. In addition, these Chicana/o writers were young intellectuals who wanted to be taken seriously as cultural workers. They wanted to write in such a way as to effect political change and bring about social justice. It is, then, not a tremendous stretch to argue that they imagined that writing in a popular form would only further isolate them and trivialize their work. Although the detective novel has garnered a great deal of academic interest over the years, a literary snobbery still persists that renders popular fiction, especially genre fiction, a minor accomplishment, something well beneath the respectability of literature. Consequently, one still frequently sees dust jacket blurbs on detective novels that triumphantly claim, ‘‘This is much more than a detective novel,’’ or, ‘‘Author X has transcended the bounds of the detective novel in her rich portrayal of the urban environment in contemporary Los Angeles.’’ Such encomiums imply that the detective novel is less than literature, that only when it shakes off the shackles of its generic limitations can it be art. Thus, Chicana/o writers of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s avoided working in a form that would allow critics to dismiss them summarily because they were working in what was considered a trashy, minor genre. The taint of the popular was to be avoided. Beginning in the 1980s, though, a boom in both women’s detective fiction and multicultural detective stories enabled Chicana/o writers to view the detective novel as a legitimate cultural enterprise. Though women had been working in the form as far back as the nineteenth century and well through the twentieth,7 Sara Paretsky’s, Sue Grafton’s, and Marcia Muller’s feminist rewritings of the hard-boiled detective in the 1980s spoke to readers’ desires for something other than the usual wise-cracking, single, white, heterosexual, male sleuth that the hard-boiled school popularized beginning in the 1920s. In April 1990, Publishers Weekly maintained that ‘‘the woman as tough professional investigator has been the single most striking development in the detective novel in the past decade,’’ and just thereafter Newsweek joined in: ‘‘Call her Samantha Spade or Philippa Marlowe and she would deck you. A tough new breed of detective is reforming the American mysINTRODUCTION: ALIENATED EYE/I

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tery novel: smart, self-sufficient, principled, stubborn, funny—and female’’ (qtd. in Walton and Jones 10). Two of the most influential mainstream publications had recognized the importance of the female detective; the genre was thus in the public’s eye as never before.8 A glance at the New York Times best-seller list indicates as well that there is space for these female and multicultural detectives. It does not take long for a new Sara Paretsky novel to hit the list, or for a new entry in Sue Grafton’s alphabet series to rise to the top. In addition to the popularity of the women’s detective story was the coincident boom of the ethnic detective. In the words of Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Monika Mueller, ‘‘Ethnic detectives seem to be everywhere’’ (11).9 This has been especially true for the African American investigator. As Paula Woods and Stephen Soitos demonstrably illustrate, the African American detective can be dated back to the turn of the twentieth century, appearing first in the writing of Pauline Hopkins. See, for instance, Hopkins’s story ‘‘Talma Gordon,’’ reprinted in Woods’s collection Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction of the 20th Century (1995). Then there is, of course, Rudolph Fisher’s 1930s classic, The Conjure Man Dies, to say nothing of the famous exploits of Chester Himes’s redoubtable duo, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, of the 1950s and 1960s. While it is important for critics to sketch out a lengthy genealogy of the African American detective novel so that we do not get our literary histories muddled and confuse the detective novel as the sole domain of white writers, it is during what Woods labels a ‘‘Third Renaissance’’ of black thought and writing in the 1980s and 1990s 10 that the African American detective novel flourishes in a way analogous to the boom in women’s detective fiction. From this Third Renaissance came the works of such famous African American detective writers as Gar Anthony Haywood, Walter Mosley, Barbara Neely, Gary Phillips, Mike Phillips, Eleanor Taylor Bland, Paula Woods, Charlotte Watson Sherman, and Valerie Wilson Wesley, to name only a few. Among these writers, Walter Mosley has gained perhaps the widest reputation. In 1995, his first Easy Rawlins novel, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), was made into a major motion picture starring Denzel Washington; subsequently, in 1998, his collection of Socrates Fortlow stories, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, debuted as an HBO film with Laurence Fishburne as Socrates. In short, the feminist and ethnic rewritings of the detective novel made the genre an appealing form for Chicana/o writers. BROWN GUMSHOES

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With this boom in women and ethnic detectives arose a concomitant critical apparatus that shored up the power of the detective story. In addition to myriad journal articles on the intersections among race, ethnicity, gender, and detective fiction, a host of edited volumes appeared, as did numerous single-authored books.11 All of these further enhanced the credibility and cultural capital of detective fiction. If the detective novel was a form, then, in which Chicana/o writers could be taken seriously and with which, perhaps, they could even gain popular appeal and critical currency, was it also a form they could bend to their ends? Was there enough flexibility within the generic conventions to accommodate the concerns of the Chicana/o community? New forms can often offer new answers. As the Greek writer Aeschylus turned to the drama (a form that did not exist in Greece prior to the sixth to fifth century b.c.e.) to understand the questions of justice, suffering, and evil under Greece’s new democracy (James 152– 154), Chicana/o authors have used the detective novel to understand the shifting political, social, cultural, and identitarian terrain of the post-nationalist period. The criminality that pervades the detective novel speaks to the alienation, criminalization, and violence surrounding Mexican Americans, both in large cities and along the border. Moreover, the detective novel’s quest for order and a knowable universe offers a sense of security in changing times. These shifting and troubling times surface in the border relations of Hinojosa’s Belken County, in the ambivalence over nationalist politics in Corpi’s and Ramos’s novels, in the violence perpetrated against homosexuals in Nava’s Henry Rios series, and in the metaphysical battle for the heart and soul of Nuevo Mexicana/os in Anaya’s Sonny Baca series. In short, each of these series encapsulates the detective story’s ‘‘desire to comprehend the unknowable, malevolent, irrational force which drives [it] in its urban setting, rooted in nineteenth-century fears of degeneration, and twentieth-century fears of anomie and alienation’’ (Munt 13). While from a critical distance it is possible to historicize the shift from nationalism to post-nationalism, I want to emphasize that this change generated a heightened sense of ambivalence and anxiety (as we will see in Ramos’s and Corpi’s series) for many Chicana/os. With the shifting post-nationalist order, that is the movement away from a solidarity of sameness and toward a dynamics of difference, many Chicana/os were both prepared to embrace this change and ambivalent about the modes of identification that a new set of shaping historical, economic, and cultural discourses would bring. Even if the new idenINTRODUCTION: ALIENATED EYE/I

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tity constructions spoke more aptly to the complex groups of people identified and identifying as Chicana/o,12 it is a dramatic event to have one’s identity shaken to its foundations. With its emphasis on reason, order, justice, and alienation, the detective novel is better suited than other genres to identify the shifting terrain of post-nationalism and to address the existential concerns that change entails. As John Cawelti observes, ‘‘The criminal act disrupts the social fabric, and the detective must use his unique investigative skills to sew it back together again.’’ In so doing ‘‘the skillful writer can reveal certain aspects of a culture that otherwise remain hidden’’ (‘‘Detecting’’ 44)—and can also reveal, I would add, elements of a culture recently emerging, such as the postnational Chicana/o subject. Let us consider for a moment the typical hero of the detective novel. S/he is the alienated outsider, the moral man or woman in the corrupt world. In his now-classic essay on the detective novel, ‘‘The Simple Art of Murder’’ (1944), Raymond Chandler made this patently clear. Speaking of the hero of the hard-boiled detective novel, he states, ‘‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. [. . .] He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor [. . .]. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world’’ (20). Despite decades of rewriting, this notion of the alienated, moral hero persists and defines the genre.13 In describing the appeal of his detective Easy Rawlins, Walter Mosley maintains, ‘‘I think people want to listen to him because they know that he is asking questions and looking for answers that are important to them. [. . .] he’s trying to define himself in spite of the world, to live by his own system of values. He’s trying to do what is right in an imperfect world. The genre may be a mystery, but the underlying questions are moral and ethical, even existential’’ (‘‘The Black Dick’’ 133). The clash Chandler and Mosley describe between the moral detective and the imperfect world ‘‘only deepens,’’ argue Hans Bertens and Theo D’haen, ‘‘as the twentieth century wears on’’ (2). This feeling of being on the outside, being the alienated other, thematizes the hero of the detective novel and resonates especially well with Chicana/os, who though subjects of the nation are often represented as alien to it. The dominant feeling for most Mexican Americans living in a post–Treaty of Guadalupe world is that they belong neither on the U.S. nor the Mexican side of the border. The Los Angeles Times journalist Rubén Martínez captures these feelings of dislocation in his multi-genre text, The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., BROWN GUMSHOES

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Mexico City, and Beyond (1992). He notes, ‘‘Wherever I am now, I must be much more than two. I must be North and South in the North and in the South’’ (5). During the 1960s, numerous Chicana/os attempted to overcome rather than embrace this quandary by imagining Aztlán as their mythic homeland, a place to return to, a place in which to locate one’s roots.14 As Mary Pat Brady observes, ‘‘By focusing on Aztlán, Chicanos could rearticulate their own experience, not as unwelcome migrants to the United States, not as exiles from the Mexican Revolution, not as dispossessed and landless peoples, but as a community with an ancient, even autochthonous relationship to a significant geographical portion of the United States’’ (145). While in many ways the cultural and political nationalist politics behind this homeland gesture have given way since the 1980s, it still has a powerful symbolic residue for a number of Chicana/os. Aztlán offered a place of being for the alienated Chicana/o other.15 By contrast, the Chicana/o detective novel offers the alienated hero not a mythic homeland, but a discursive space from which to examine the world and its shaping discourses. Further, alienation is not always an unproductive state. As the Novalis epigraph at the beginning of this chapter makes clear, we would do well to remember that alienation is not only about degradation, it is an opportunity for evaluation, an evaluation that I believe is crucial for a population whose identities are often under siege. In other words, that alienated hero, that cultural other, is both out and in. One can never truly step outside the discourses (e.g., race, nation, sexuality, gender, class) that structure one’s identity. We are always imbricated within them, but when we recognize those moments of alienation, of not belonging, as the detective hero always does, then we can find ways to turn that degradation into evaluation.16 As Andrew Pepper argues of the ‘‘black or Native American detective,’’ his or her ‘‘fractured sense of self [. . .] problematizes a straightforward model of identity formation’’ and allows that detective better opportunities ‘‘to view the polyethnic environment in suitably ambiguous terms’’ (‘‘Bridges’’ 242). Yet we cannot blithely accept alienation as a term with an explanatory power all its own. As Carl Gutiérrez-Jones avers, ‘‘Notions of alienation, whether Marxist or psychoanalytic, [. . .] are highly abstract and thus limited in their ability to explain specific cultural contexts’’ (Rethinking the Borderlands 130). Despite this abstraction, the hero’s alienated stance is a perch from which to see from a new angle, a way to look askew at social relations so as to more powerfully evaluate them. INTRODUCTION: ALIENATED EYE/I

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The alienation in itself is not a powerful optic, but what gets seen from that standpoint shows us the contingent, as opposed to necessary, nature of many social structures. In the language of the Russian formalists, it defamiliarizes and allows us to see things afresh, as if for the first time.17 From Rolando Hinojosa to Michael Nava, to Lucha Corpi, to Manuel Ramos, to Rudolfo Anaya, that project of self-evaluation and of understanding the discourses that shape identity remains at the heart of their novels.Their heroes capture what Paul Auster’s detective protagonist, Quinn, realizes in City of Glass, namely that the concerns over knowledge (epistemology) in the detective novel reveal central tenets about being and identity (ontology): ‘‘The term [private eye] held a triple meaning for Quinn. Not only was it the letter ‘i,’ standing for ‘investigator,’ it was ‘I’ in the upper case, the tiny life-bud buried in the body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was also the physical eye of the writer, the eye of the man who looks out from himself into the world and demands that the world reveal itself to him’’ (15–16).18 Detective novels, then, combine epistemology and ontology in the following fashion: the driving force behind these narratives is a quest for knowledge. Indeed, the successful detective enlists and combines multiple ways of knowing the world—interviews, rational deduction, empirical data (such as fingerprints, photographs, time of death, etc.), and very often intuition or hunches—in order to solve the crime or crimes under investigation. In working through these epistemological concerns—How do I know what I know? How do I know what I know is true? How do I use this knowledge to apprehend the criminal?—the detective invariably enters into an ontological query into his/her own sense of being in the world.19 Or, as Laurence Roth has recently argued about American Jewish detective fiction, detective novels are ‘‘a kind of identity-shaping project’’ (4). He further adds that American Jewish detective stories are a part of ‘‘the process of modern Jewish selfdefinition and self-explanation’’ (11).20 This identity project takes hold in the bind between ways of knowing and ways of being. To elaborate, detective novels are about discerning the mysteries of identity. At the heart of their narrative, after all, is the quest to reveal who the criminal is. In a diverse array of mystery novels, however, time and again the detective also unravels a mystery about him- or herself. The novel is as much his or her story as it is the story of the crime. As Alex Abella’s fictional detective/lawyer notes during one of his investigations: ‘‘I wanted to know about these people [the practitioners of BROWN GUMSHOES

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santería he is investigating] and by so doing come to know myself as well’’ (Killing 74). For the detective to interpret the traces left by the criminal is to engage simultaneously in a process of self-exegesis. Peter Hühn argues that the detective is the reader of a crime written by a criminal, and in order to remain free, the criminal must write his story in such a way as to lead the reader/detective down the wrong path. This reading detective, however, takes on identity implications as well as hermeneutic ones. That is, in interpreting the criminal traces, the detective, especially the hard-boiled one, becomes engaged in an ongoing struggle with the criminal, a struggle that affects the detective’s identity in ways that it does not in the ratiocinative mysteries of the classical, locked-room type.21 Hühn maintains that ‘‘interpretation, as practiced by the private eye, is presented as an interaction between the reading subject and the object (the text [i.e., the one written by the criminal in committing the crime]) in which neither side remains a stable entity. The detective’s reading activities affect the text (the mystery he investigates) as he in turn is affected by it’’ (461; emphasis in original). That the detective’s interaction with the criminal text reveals fragments of his or her identity and shows that identity is always in process is yet another feature of the genre that makes it perfectly suitable for the Chicana/o writers who explore how changing identity paradigms have made the Chicana/o subject a not–‘‘stable entity.’’ This is not to pathologize; rather I want to highlight how this generic convention underscores identity as process, not product—as a state both of being and becoming. As a final note about the importance of detective fiction for understanding post-nationalist Chicana/o identities, I want to temper the frequent claim that popular genres invariably reach mass audiences and thereby become powerful tools for social change. As a mass-market genre, the detective novel promises to reach an audience beyond the camps of the usual literati, no slight concern for a group of writers who have always connected their cultural projects to larger political and social concerns. One must be careful, however, not to assume that working in a popular genre necessarily translates into mass sales, nor should one mistakenly conflate popularity with political change. This is why I say that working in a popular genre promises to reach a large audience. Indeed, the publishing history of Chicana/o detective novels shows that that promise has been infrequently fulfilled. Lucha Corpi and Rolando Hinojosa both publish with Arte Público, INTRODUCTION: ALIENATED EYE/I

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a fine, but small, independent press out of Houston, Texas. A stroll through a commercial bookstore such as Barnes and Noble or Borders (i.e., one likely to attract a popular audience and generate mass sales) turns up very few, if any, titles by Arte Público. This press, which deserves much credit for promoting and supporting Latina/o writers, simply does not have the distribution and promotional resources of a larger trade press. Hinojosa and Corpi publish with Arte Público in part because that press keeps their work in print, a fate not shared by many mass-market publications. Michael Nava, the most prolific Chicano detective novelist, publishes with Alyson, a press that also supports its authors by keeping their books in print, but like Arte Público, its sales figures cannot compete with a larger publishing house. Ballantine, however, purchased the paperback rights for two of Nava’s seven novels (The Hidden Law [1992] and How Town [1990]), increasing his circulation and bearing testimony to his marketability. In addition, his last three novels (The Burning Plain [1997], The Death of Friends [1996], and Rag and Bone [2001]) came out with G. P. Putnam and made it into mass-market paperbacks. Manuel Ramos publishes with St. Martins, a major outlet for detective fiction. Of his four novels to date, however, only the first one (The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz) has been brought out in paperback, and more depressingly, of the four novels (all published between 1993 and 1997), it is the only one still in print.22 Contrary to the suggestion that these novels are reaching a broad audience, this history suggests that his novels did not generate enough popular sales to merit paperback editions. Rudolfo Anaya has enjoyed the vast distribution capabilities of Time Warner for his three-volume Sonny Baca series (Zia Summer, Rio Grande Fall, and Shaman Winter), but he did not need the detective novel genre to garner an audience for his ideas.23 He had captured a mass following with the publication of his coming-of-age tale, Bless Me, Ultima, in 1972. The general claim that detective novels typically reach a broad audience is correct.With Chicana/o detective writers, however, that has not usually been the case. The publishing history I just traced offers a suggestive idea about the scope of these novels’ sales. In short, they do not compete with those of typical mass-market detective fiction, such as that of J. A. Jance, whose novels now have initial print runs of 195,000 (Walton and Jones 26). Mass sales aside, however, these novels make important forays into understanding the contemporary historical moment and the position of the Chicana/o subject within it. BROWN GUMSHOES

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The five body chapters of this book share productive overlaps and make unique contributions to the investigation of post-nationalist Chicana/o identities. Each chapter focuses on a particular writer; the chapters are arranged chronologically according to the publication date of the first novel in each of the writer’s series. I begin with Rolando Hinojosa’s Rafe Buenrostro series and argue that in Partners in Crime and Ask A Policeman the escalation of crime Hinojosa depicts speaks directly to the changing economic and social relations along the U.S.Mexico border in the late twentieth century. These advancing economic relations, moreover, reduce human beings to economic commodities, alienating Hinojosa’s characters from home and family, the imagined refuge of the Chicana/o community. This heightened sense of alienation, I contend, ultimately compels Hinojosa to adopt a rhetoric of nostalgia and despair to make sense of the post-nationalist times along the border. Chapter two examines Michael Nava’s Henry Rios series. A gay lawyer working principally out of the Bay Area, Rios is an amateur sleuth who in the pursuit of justice illustrates a multiplicity of ways for us to consider a series of practices that would queer, and thereby open up, the dominant discourses of family and home. This reading of the contemporary Chicana/o subject reveals a range of practices and discourses about Chicano homosexuality that has been largely absent from critical discussions of the Chicano subjectivity. In chapter three, I argue that Lucha Corpi’s Gloria Damasco series seeks to understand better how history and memory shape identity and to gauge their corresponding impact on political movements. With each novel, Corpi, a feminist writer steeped in the Chicana/o activism of the 1960s and 1970s, struggles with the often-monolithic construction of Chicana/o cultural identity associated with the Chicana/o Movement. In coming to recognize the fluidity of identity, Damasco grows increasingly ambivalent about her cultural identity because as she tries to construct a historically causal chain to solve the novels’ mysteries and understand her identity formation, she finds herself bumping up against the discontinuities of the past and the present, as well as against her own nostalgia for the Movement. Chapter four moves to Denver, Colorado, for Manuel Ramos’s Luis Montez series. His detective, much like Corpi’s, finds himself embroiled in an existential quest that pits his Movement identity against a shifting, unstable, contemporary one. This chapter addresses the practice and performance of masculinity—a subject, incidentally, with INTRODUCTION: ALIENATED EYE/I

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which Chicana/o studies has not engaged with much depth or breadth. Montez must investigate how the Movement-era discourses of nationalism and carnalismo (brotherhood) inscribe and potentially undermine his masculinity. Underpinning this inquiry is a racial anxiety that he may become an anachronism rendered obsolete and invisible in the post-nationalist moment. In chapter five, I maintain that Rudolfo Anaya’s conflicted retreat to the mythical and mystical in his Sonny Baca series runs counter to both social change and the evidentiary and ratiocinative concerns of the detective novel. Throughout the series Anaya demonstrates his awareness of pressing social concerns in New Mexico such as homelessness, unemployment, nuclear poisoning, and the drug trade, but these concerns become no more than indices of the larger battle between good and evil, which Baca fights on spiritual rather than material grounds. Moreover, Baca’s spiritual battle casts him in the awkward role of the Chicano Everyman, an untenable position in a world of proliferating and protean identity formations. The conclusion revisits the broad arguments of the study to draw together its reflections on detection and identification and to meditate briefly on the model’s applicability for Latina/o writers not from the Chicana/o community, such as Carolina Garcia-Aguilera and Marcos McPeek Villatoro. Thinking through the works of these writers allows me to point toward some suggestive comparative angles for Latina/o studies. This book, then, situates the Chicana/o detective novel as a signal marker of post-nationalism. While one would not wish to argue that Chicana and Chicano writers began composing mystery novels because of a turn to post-nationalism, the detective novel offers a unique optic for understanding the shift in modes of identification and its connection to changing social relations in the post-nationalist period. The Chicana/o Movement of the 1960s and 1970s had been a powerful tool for effecting necessary educational, political, social, and economic transformation, but given the changing political and social environment of the 1980s, it was time to look for new political and cultural strategies to effect change and figure out one’s place in the world. In other words, the nationalist models of sameness were giving way to new models of difference. As George Lipsitz observes, we must ‘‘accept the necessity for each generation to fashion a social warrant appropriate to its own historically specific needs and circumstances’’ (Ameri-

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can Studies 56). In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, that warrant has been to understand identity not as stable, but as dynamic, not as biologically determined, but as socially constructed. As a product of this historical period, the Chicana/o detective novel has much to tell us about the dynamics of difference and the evolving Chicana/o subject.

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chapter 1

ROLANDO HINOJOSA’S KCDT SERIES INSTRUMENTAL RATIONALITY AND THE ADVANCE OF LATE CAPITALISM IN BELKEN COUNTY

Rolando Hinojosa’s writing has been dedicated to creating a fictional microcosm of social relations in the South Texas Rio Grande Valley and along the U.S.-Mexico border. He has developed a fictional county, Belken, with all the insight and inspiration with which Faulkner brought his Yoknapatawpha to life. While antebellum and postbellum race relations between blacks and whites absorbed Faulkner’s imagination, it is the transborder class, cultural, and social relations between Mexico and South Texas that occupy Hinojosa. His Klail City Death Trip 1 series is, as José David Saldívar notes, ‘‘a sensitive and skillful literary metahistory of the Río Grande Valley’’ (‘‘Rolando Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip’’ 44). In the nearly dozen volumes that constitute the kcdt series, Hinojosa supplies the reader with vignettes, stories, sketches, and portraits that illuminate the inner workings of his developing county, a county that mirrors the historical development of Texas and Mexico and covers roughly three generations of Mexicana/o and Chicana/o inhabitants—those born in the late nineteenth century who left Texas to fight in the Mexican Revolution of 1910; those born in the 1930s; and those who fought in the Korean War.2 Within the context of this metahistory and literary oeuvre, I am most interested in the two police procedurals that Hinojosa penned— Partners in Crime (1985) and Ask a Policeman (1998). These two novels, which come late in the kcdt chronology, speak to the tension Saldívar observes in the series as ‘‘tradition in the past versus ‘reification’ in the present and future’’ (ibid. 50). This tension reaches its apotheosis in the two novels, where crime and disorder threaten to eclipse tradition and order. These competing tensions have long been a staple of the detective genre, from the classic, or locked-room, mystery where crime is

an aberration to the hard-boiled where crime and mean streets are the norm. Consequently, the very form of the detective novel suits the thematic and ideological concerns of Hinojosa’s inquiry into the rapidly changing economic and social relations along the border and in the Valley in the late twentieth century. As Hinojosa relates in a 1985 interview, he is concerned with writing about ‘‘the false economy in the Valley; [. . .] that economy which has been brought in by the drug trafficking down there’’ (Saldívar, ‘‘Our Southwest’’ 183).3 Partners and its sequel, Policeman, bring the reader into a world in which corruption runs rampant in the Valley, an area that despite external threats remained ‘‘an idyllic place where the collective spirit reigned amidst heterogeneity’’ (R. Sánchez 77). In Hinojosa’s detective fiction, the instrumental rationality of late capitalism flattens out social relations, thereby demonstrating how material economic encounters can alienate one from home and family. In a postnationalist landscape and post-industrial economy, the inhabitants of Belken, and by extension Aztlán,4 can no longer find refuge in a mythologized Chicana/o homeland of solidarity and ethnic unity. Rather, this space intertwines and overlaps 5 with the dominant economic and social relations of the late twentieth century. Unlike the other authors in this study, Hinojosa does not foreground his protagonist’s personal quest for identity. As Hector Calderón has argued about earlier novels in the kcdt series, Hinojosa’s focus differs from much other Chicana/o fiction that has concerned itself with the individual’s identity—instead, Hinojosa explores the development of a collective character (140–141). His project engages with the mutually constitutive relationship between economy and culture as he maps the cultural and political geography of a developing Rio Grande Valley. While the focus is not on individual identities, the novels’ illumination of economic and social relations in South Texas under late capitalism provides a historical context of the post-nationalist period necessary to understanding the pursuits of identity in Nava, Corpi, Ramos, and Anaya. Partners immerses us in the 1970s, when late capitalism was consolidating its forces and the Chicana/o Movement was on the wane, and Policeman brings us into the post-nationalist era, which the novel depicts as a period of unchecked violence in which greed is the order of the day and avarice trumps family, the one-time place marker of Mexicana/o and Chicana/o unity. Moreover, the kcdt series in general and these two detective novels in particular illustrate the everROLANDO HINOJOSA’S KCDT SERIES

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changing lines of force that fluctuate between cultural and socioeconomic relations.6 In ‘‘Rolando Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip: A Critical Introduction,’’ José Saldívar notes that Max Horkheimer’s essay ‘‘The End of Reason’’ had influenced his reading of Partners in Crime. Writing in 1941, Horkheimer maintained that the fundamental concepts of civilization, among them reason, were in rapid decay. He attributed this to the end of liberal capitalism and the rise of state interventionism, notions both of which are also readily traceable in Hinojosa’s detective fiction. It is curious and thought provoking that an essay on the death of reason should influence Saldívar’s reading of Hinojosa’s detective novel, for reason and order are the very hallmarks of the mystery genre. While the causes to which Horkheimer ascribes the decline of reason are present in Hinojosa’s text, the novel nevertheless assiduously appeals to reason to make sense of ‘‘senseless’’ crimes: ‘‘A stupid murder, he [Rafe] muttered, for the third or fourth time, as he attempted to bring a sense of order to a senseless occurrence’’ (Partners 9). Saldívar does not explicitly show the connections between the end of reason and his own interpretation of Partners, yet the idea is a suggestive one. Reading Partners along these lines ties in nicely with the procedural, the subgenre of the detective novel under which both Partners and Policeman fall. In the procedural, as in Horkheimer’s essay, reason is reduced to instrumental rationality: reason not as ‘‘the herald of eternal ideas [. . .] only dimly shadowed in the material world,’’ but reason as efficiency (Horkheimer 27). ‘‘Reason in this sense,’’ writes Horkheimer, ‘‘is as indispensable in the modern technique of war as it always has been in the conduct of business. Its features can be summarized as the optimum adaptation of means to ends, thinking as an energy-conserving operation. It is a pragmatic instrument oriented to expediency, cold and sober’’ (28). Along this route, then, the characters in Belken County become ciphers of the rationality pursued during the novel’s historical moment. Rather than examples of plenitude, the characters are surface markers of a set of changing socioeconomic conditions in the Valley. They serve, that is, as the figures necessary to explain the rationality of late capitalism in Belken County. Hence, the members of the Belken County Homicide Squad—Rafe Buenrostro, Culley Donovan, Joe Molden, Peter Hauer, and Sam Dorson—could be replaced by any other state functionaries capable of giving some order to the chaos ensuing in Klail City and across the border. For instance, Hinojosa adds a new detective (Ike Cantú) to the homiBROWN GUMSHOES

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cide squad and transfers one (Joe Molden) to grand theft auto in Ask a Policeman, without ever explaining or needing to explain this move. They are police functionaries, dispensable and substitutable. In a different mystery genre, say the classic or the hard-boiled, Hinojosa could not pull this off. Neither Agatha Christie nor Raymond Chandler, for instance, could replace Poirot or Marlowe (their respective detectives) from one novel to the next. In the classic and the hard-boiled novels, that is, readers come to identify with their protagonists as heroes, not functionaries. As Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones observe, ‘‘Works in a series are routinely marketed by appealing to the reader’s investment in a character and continuing interest in his or her life story’’ (152). The police procedural’s shift to state interventionism, corporate heroes, and instrumental rationality, however, make Hinojosa’s character substitutions possible and even plausible.7 Since understanding the project at play in Hinojosa’s detective novels depends on a familiarity with the genre in which he writes, pausing for a moment to consider some of the central features of the procedural is merited.8 First, the lone private investigator is replaced with a team of police investigators. In the procedural there are no celebrated, lone heroes whose code of conduct places them above the debauched criminal world. Instead of an individual private eye walking down the mean streets, the procedural emphasizes group work and the collection of evidence that would help build a case against a particular criminal or group of criminals. Thus, in Partners and Policeman, power is distributed across a number of investigators rather than just a lone private eye. Robert Winston and Nancy Mellerski argue that the shift from the lone private eye to the ‘‘corporate hero’’ 9 is connected to the post– World War II change from a ‘‘market to a managed economy’’: There can be no doubt that the rise of the police procedural after World War II suggests a response to the technological penetration and increased bureaucratic complexity of post-industrial society which operates by proposing a squad of individualized detectives, each possessing certain crucial skills which enable them to work collectively to investigate the same systemic evil that the hard-boiled detective nostalgically confronted alone. Thus, the formula of the police procedural reacts to the new socioeconomic reality by requiring a corporate detective, a squad sufficiently diverse to cope with the complexities of a world controlled by corporate powers. (6)

This connection between the protagonist’s shifting identity and the changing economic structure resonates well with the flattening out of ROLANDO HINOJOSA’S KCDT SERIES

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social relations coincident with the rise of instrumental rationality. The shift in the hero and the shift from reason to instrumental rationality, that is, are both articulated to the calculus of a late-capitalist economy. Also, in an effort to appear more realistic than its classic and hardboiled predecessors,10 the procedural seeks to portray a world in which the police force, like any real police team, would be at work on multiple crimes at once.11 The upshot of this change is that crime is portrayed as ubiquitous and never permanently eradicated. At best it is momentarily contained. As Leroy L. Panek observes, ‘‘Unlike the classical detective story, in the police book the world of the novel is not made whole again. Unlike the hardboiled story, in the police novel the hero finds little enduring sense of having symbolically achieved even a small fragment of justice’’ (169). Thus, as is common to the genre, Hinojosa’s procedurals ‘‘end on a note of barely controlled chaos rather than restored and validated order’’ (Winston and Mellerski 2). Reification wins out over tradition, and underpinning this victory is a vast complex of economic, social, and cultural relations that attend the border culture of the kcdt series in the late twentieth century. Moreover, one gets the sense that no one is above suspicion and that all are susceptible to fall. This feeling haunts the epigraphs to Partners: And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. St. Matthew 10:36 Virgil: From a single crime learn the wickedness of all. Aenid, ii. 65 A chill snake lurks in the grass. Eclogue, iii. 93 12

It is precisely the morally complex and criminally replete world of the procedural that Hinojosa exploits in his Rafe Buenrostro mysteries, where the poles of good and evil are not easy to locate, where anyone is potentially susceptible to corruption, and where ‘‘heroes’’ and ‘‘bad guys’’ are not as polarized as in earlier forms of the detective story. In Hinojosa’s detective novels, we enter a polyphonic world of competing social and economic relationships that shape history and culture. Analyzing these relationships to see how they come into play as relations of forces that are simultaneously productive and constraining establishes a narrative about the U.S.-Mexico border and the people who live with it and move back and forth across it.

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PARTNERS IN CRIME

Unlike the earlier novels in the kcdt series, Partners does not foreground the relationship between Anglo agribusiness and Chicanas and Chicanos, though that relationship serves as a fundamental subtext. Indeed, the Texas Rangers, the armed enforcement agency of the developers/farmers who so frequently populate the other kcdt narratives, are conspicuously absent from Partners. Moreover, Chicanos, like Rafe Buenrostro, who is second-in-command of the homicide detectives of the Belken County police force, wield a certain degree of authority in this narrative. But the shift of attention away from agribusiness and the Texas Rangers is not an eschewal of racial violence and economic oppression. Rather, Hinojosa’s detective novels recast the power dynamics of the Valley in a new set of economic and social relations. The struggle, that is, no longer deals principally with the white supremacist farm society and native Mexican ranch society, but with transborder drug trafficking and the ubiquitous presence of crime in Klail City. Bear in mind that Partners (1985) was written in the midst of the Reagan and Bush administrations’ highly publicized War on Drugs, and that Policeman (1998) certainly has that war as part of its textual memory.13 In Partners, the transborder police alliance between the Belken County Homicide Squad and the Tamaulipas Police Force—‘‘there had been several cases recently to serve as examples of cooperation’’ (173)— metaphorically represents Hinojosa’s attempt to ruminate on the possibilities of a reunited Mexico.14 A brief review of the central plot points will help better situate this argument. The murder of three men in a diner in Klail City causes the Tamaulipas and Belken police squads to join forces, because these murders are linked to a drug ring in Mexico. The three dead men include a friend of the Belken County prosecutor (Gus ‘‘Dutch’’ Elder), and two Mexican nationals, Andrés Cavazos and César Becerra, both notorious drug thugs. The connection of Cavazos and Becerra to a drug ring in Mexico remains unknown to Rafe Buenrostro and company until they are invited to dinner with Captain Lisandro Gómez Solís of the Barrones, Tamaulipas, police force. Further, Culley Donovan, Rafe’s partner, and Gómez Solís have long been friends, and the dinner is, in part, a birthday celebration for Donovan. At the dinner Gómez Solís shares vital information with the Belken County group for the resolution of the murders in Klail, hereafter known as the Kum Bak Inn murders. The collaborative effort between the two groups makes them, as the ROLANDO HINOJOSA’S KCDT SERIES

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title of the novel suggests, ‘‘partners in crime,’’ or more aptly, ‘‘partners against crime.’’ The Belken squad does not, however, realize that Gómez Solís is actually a partner in crime: he knew about the Becerra, Cavazos, and Zaragoza drug ring, and when he found out that they possessed 278 pounds of uncut cocaine, he wanted in on the business and conspired to have them killed. In passing along his information, he is trying to keep Rafe and company off his own trail. Additionally, while the Belken County team brings the hit men to justice, the novel does not resolve the police department corruption in Tamaulipas. Through the collaborative efforts of the transborder police force, Hinojosa offers the reader the possibility to imagine a unified Mexico, a Greater Mexico, metaphorically at least. A voice in a larger discourse on nations, race, and class, Partners in Crime articulates in its capacity as an ideologeme that the potential for a reunited Mexico in the era of late capitalism is an idyllic fantasy. Genuine transborder police collaboration founders because of a vested interest in particular economic regimes. In addition, given the detective novel’s affinities with the national romance, the critical dialogue over national boundaries in which Partners in Crime circulates is a particularly interesting exchange. Like the romance, the detective novel in its various manifestations (e.g., the hard-boiled and the police procedural) places a particular interest in the legendary and on the construction of myths. And it is clear in retrospect that these qualities of the romance contributed significantly to the national imagination of the United States. For instance, James Fenimore Cooper’s romances, especially the Leatherstocking Tales, used the mythical and legendary aspects of the romance form to construct a particular image of the expanding United States, an image that fortified the lived experience of the frontierswomen and -men in their westward growth under the banner of manifest destiny. By analogy, these very same attributes—the use of the legendary and the mythical—helped writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and later Jack Webb of Dragnet construct a particular romance about urban life. Like their romance counterparts, the detective writers assisted the United States in imagining an identity for itself.15 While the mean streets that Philip Marlowe walked down were not the frontiers that Natty Bumpo tramped through, the United States nonetheless needed a way to think about itself as it encountered and participated in the rapid development of an industrializing, nineteenthcentury world. Writers like Chandler and Hammett found themselves BROWN GUMSHOES

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writing about the machinations of capital and the attendant disorders and displacements of industrial growth. In addressing the construction of the hard-boiled detective and his/her grappling with the rise of modernity and its attendant disorders, Jon Thompson asserts that ‘‘the hard-boiled detective can never be entirely defeated by his environment, for that would result in his abdication of his role as problem solver; moreover, one of the most basic conventions of the hard-boiled genre is an active, physically vigorous protagonist who can give a punch as well as take one’’ (137). The nation could not always figure itself in an ‘‘exceptional’’ light, but the detective novel provided the discursive formula in which to develop a national imagination to understand social relations as they evolved under modernity and an indefatigably industrializing capitalist system. It is particularly telling, then, that Hinojosa first turns to the detective novel when he wants to examine the proliferation of corruption in his fictional Belken County. Like Rafe Buenrostro’s police report that attempted to make sense of a senseless murder, Hinojosa’s police procedurals are an attempt to make sense of a set of changing socioeconomic conditions in South Texas. As the narrator notes in Partners, ‘‘Mexican oil and Valley cotton had traditionally brought in much of the revenue; in Nineteen Seventy-two, drugs and their artificial affluence were forcing their way into the economy’’ (115). Or, as Hinojosa avers, ‘‘Drugs, in many ways, have transformed the Mexicano society in Belken; have broken up family units, for one; have destroyed a cohesiveness for another’’ (Saldívar, ‘‘Our Southwest’’ 183–184). Not only does Partners articulate the inability of Mexico to imagine itself in a reunited fashion, then, but the very source of that failure—the artificial affluence of the drug culture—also threatens to unsettle the environs of Klail City. As Cornel West has remarked on the culture of advanced capitalist American society, it ‘‘more and more is the culture that evolves around the market, around buying and selling, around a process of commodification that tends to undermine values, structures of meaning in the name of the expansion of buying and selling, in the name of the procuring of profit’’ (Prophetic Thought 148). In a series that has charted the development of Belken County and its inhabitants, Hinojosa finds himself pitted in a struggle between nostalgia and despair as he grapples with the attendant disorders of a burgeoning town in the throes of late-capitalist development. Let me again stress that as a result of the form in which Hinojosa chooses to write, he must create a world replete with criminal activity. ROLANDO HINOJOSA’S KCDT SERIES

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The procedural genre demands multiple ongoing criminal activities. In the course of Partners, the Belken County Homicide Squad responds to the mistaken murder of an apartment superintendent (who also happens to be a pedophile), the murder of Charles Darling, the bribing of a number of bank tellers by some drug runners, the Kum Bak Inn murders, and, retrospectively, the Peggy MacDougall hatchet murders. While generic conventions mandate that Hinojosa keep a number of crimes going in his procedural, the cumulative effect of the crimes is a sense of widespread disease in Belken County and a sense that in this period of artificial affluence no one is beyond reproach. The reader senses this threat of criminal omnipresence most acutely around the laundering of drug money at several Klail City banks. A number of unidentified drug dealers need to exchange their earnings at the bank for larger bills and then funnel this money into dummy accounts so their drug dealings will remain untraceable. To pull this feat off, the drug dealers have bribed a number of bank tellers and bank officers to participate in these illicit transactions, and it is with these Klail Citians’ susceptibility to bribes that a sense of despair and nostalgia begins to pervade the novel. For had Hinojosa merely related the presence of drug lords in Klail City, as readers we could have felt that a localized bad element had trespassed the city boundaries and that only it needed to be eradicated. In other words, there would have been an easily identifiable problem and a set solution. When the narrative, however, indicts the supposedly upstanding citizens and employees of Klail City, then one must account for a larger set of circumstances and consequences. That the drug trade spreads beyond a limited group of thugs is cause for despair and confusion, and with this despair comes the rhetoric of nostalgia. This nostalgia roots itself specifically in the character of Jehu Malacara, vice president of Klail City Bank. Shortly after police officials expose the laundering scheme, Jehu is seated in his office, and we catch him in a reflective moment: ‘‘He leaned back and stared at the old wideangle photograph marking the opening of the original Klail City High School in 1921. He wondered if some of the people in the photograph were related to those bank employees, busy at work counting out dope money for their new employers’’ (155). Faced with the spread of an unthinkable corruption, Jehu reflects on what must, at first glance, appear to him as simpler times. Chronologically removed from his day by a period of fifty-one years, the photograph conjures up both images of a nascent Klail City and a palpable despair over its contemporary BROWN GUMSHOES

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state. While the snapshot freezes one synchronic moment in the development of this fictional town, Jehu provides a diachronic perspective as he reflects on the possible ancestral connections among the subjects of the photograph and the indicted tellers. The photograph, that is, marks one historical moment in the development of Klail City, and calls upon us to reflect on its contemporary resonance. We may turn again here to the connections between the romance and the detective novel to sort through this rhetoric of nostalgia. In his preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne identified the salience of history for the romance, and, I will argue, by extension for its import to the detective novel. The romance writer ‘‘attempt[s] to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us. It is a Legend prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in the distance, down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist [. . .]’’ (4). One aim of the romance, then, is to weave a web that connects historical events and eras. The romancer attempts to give us a diachronic perspective rather than an assemblage of disconnected synchronic moments. Analogously, Hinojosa as proceduralist writes his own police report on the events that recently have taken place in Klail City and attempts to connect them through hints and traces to a now-bygone time. Indeed, taken as a whole, the kcdt series is the romance of South Texas. At this moment in the series, Hinojosa is the romancer as proceduralist, reporting the most recent events in his fictional town. In addition to the photographs, memories of war bring the legendary mist of Klail City and its inhabitants into the pages of Partners. For instance, there is the curious figure of John Milton Crossland, the African American ranch hand who discovers Charles Darling’s corpse. Crossland’s role in the narrative is puzzling; other than alerting the Belken County Homicide Squad to a recent murder, his principal function is to allow the narrator to reflect on the Philippine and Cuban campaigns of the War of 1898 and the Brownsville Raid of 1906. Crossland is a historical marker of the dishonorable discharge of 167 black soldiers (himself included) by Teddy Roosevelt in 1907. As the narrator comments, ‘‘The number of those who remembered what had happened in ’07, what had led to the so-called rebellion—what had led, in fact, to the shooting— that number was small and getting smaller’’ (14). The vague reference to ‘‘what had happened in ’07’’ refers to Roosevelt’s dismissal of the black soldiers after the Brownsville Raid, which occurred near Fort Brown in Brownsville, Texas, on August 13, 1906. ROLANDO HINOJOSA’S KCDT SERIES

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A great deal of racial tension filled the city when the First Battalion, Twenty-Fifth Infantry of the United States Army was assigned to Fort Brown in 1906. The battalion consisted of about 170 African American soldiers, many of whom had fought in the Cuban and Philippine campaigns of 1898 with Theodore Roosevelt. Yet they were not welcome in Brownsville. In the words of the then-mayor Dr. Frederick J. Combe, ‘‘These people will not stand for colored troops; they do not like them. . . . These Mexican people do not want them here’’ (Weaver 21). Or, as Victoriano Fernandez of the Brownsville police was overheard to have said, ‘‘The colored fellows will have to behave themselves or we will get rid of them, and all that we will have to do is to kill a couple of them’’ (22). The skirmishes and fighting between the townspeople and the soldiers reached its apex when, on the evening of August 13, 1906, a group of men fired into stores and homes near the fort, killing a bartender and wounding a police officer. Without proof, the African American troops were held responsible for the episode, and President Roosevelt dishonorably discharged 167 African American soldiers. It was not until September 28, 1972, that the dismissed soldiers had the indictments against them overturned.16 Similarly, Rafe serves as a historical marker in the narrative too. When he visits Michael Woodall’s office because he may be associated with the recently murdered Charles Darling, photographs connect us to a bygone moment in Rafe’s life. Rafe sees two different photographs of Mr. Woodall’s sons from World War II, and ‘‘the thought of the war [takes] him to Korea briefly’’ (34). We know from other narratives in the series (e.g., Korean Love Songs and Useless Servants) of Rafe’s military service in Korea. Indeed, as Ramón Saldívar indicates, ‘‘Rafa [Rafe] in Korea and Japan begins to feel a sense of the way in which capitalist institutions use human lives in terms of their ‘instrumentality’’’ (144). Such feelings of instrumentality and alienation are precisely those that generate feelings of nostalgia, and it is that nostalgia that the historical markers in the novel militate against. The moments in Partners that bring us back to specific events (the founding of the high school, the 1906 rebellion, and the Korean War) remind us of the historical dimension of this narrative, a dimension, at times nostalgic, which serves to record the trials and tribulations of Klail City. Moreover, the war narratives serve as reminders that while a number of soldiers of color fought on foreign shores in the name of democracy, they returned from the wars to a less-than-equitable society. These historical traces become a prominent concern for the narrator BROWN GUMSHOES

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as he pauses to interrogate the reification of history and the emotional detachment we gain from bygone moments, moments the romancer and the proceduralist attempt to bring home to the reader: There is something antiseptic about distance. For one, a person can gaze at a painting—no matter how horrible and gruesome—provided it is far enough away in distance and in history. [. . .] Pictures do not bring the horror as close as the real thing. Oh, some Vietnamese cop blows a man’s head off with a .45, and it’s frightful, unpleasant, and ugly. But it’s a movie, a picture. It’s real, and yet, it is film. And, it happened so far away, too. Add the racial origin of the people involved, and that too, is at another remove. (192)

While it is the Kum Bak Inn murders that move the narrator to this disquisition on history, distance, and familiarity, readers might extrapolate from these passages a metacritical reflection on the role of Partners as its own centripetal voice in a dialogue about South Texas, Mexico, and race relations in the United States. The narrator in the above passage pontificates on the imaginary relationship individuals maintain to their real conditions of existence that Althusser has defined as being the core of ideology (162). That access to history is mediated by texts—paintings, photos, films, books, etc.—fosters the imagined relation to the real: ‘‘Pictures do not bring the horror as close as the real thing.’’ All of these texts give us snapshots of history, and it is our duty as critics to put these hints and traces together in an effort to overcome the distancing obstacles of time. When we fail, or refuse to put these traces together, we are complicit in the reification of human relations.We partake of an instrumental rationality that ossifies and sterilizes history. The traces will always be there, or as Hinojosa’s narrator often says, quoting Eustace Budgell, ‘‘Facts are stubborn things; they refuse to go away.’’ Thus, it remains our task as critics to assemble these bits of knowledge into a coherent construction that is alive with the dynamism and fluidity of all social relations. In thinking through the historical, social, and political contours of Partners, I argued that the narrative’s desire to reimagine a unified Greater Mexico was frustrated. Set in the throes of an advanced capitalist economy, this desire could not be realized. Under a mature late capitalism, accumulation and production are more flexible than they were under Fordist models of production.17 The contemporary story of the 1990s and 2000s is about what economists refer to as ‘‘just-in-time’’ ROLANDO HINOJOSA’S KCDT SERIES

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capital. National economies are more and more global in nature, and certainly under this model, strong nation-states with robust economies will prevail. But this is not a story about acquiring new landmasses. A Greater Mexico in the contemporary moment, that is, could only ever be a fiction; it could never, given the economic interests and might of the United States, be a plausible possibility. Additionally, in the narrative trajectory of Partners, the vested interests of Captain Gómez Solís of the Tamaulipas police force frustrate this imagined reunification. Showing the spread of corruption across the border and among Belken County Chicana/os, moreover, prohibits the reader from falling into essentialist traps about identity politics. Indeed, throughout the kcdt series, Hinojosa is especially careful not to descend into binary positionings of power; rather, his narrators capture the unfolding of social relations in their irreducible complexities. Written in 1985, Partners anticipates many of the current debates about the spread of globalization and its human consequences, and it even foreshadows what Arturo Aldama sees as the challenges of contemporary Chicana/o border studies, namely ‘‘to analyze the complex relationships among the uneven edges of the US/Mexico border,’’ and ‘‘the articulation of racialized, subaltern, feminist, and diasporic identities’’ (36). In Partners, the complexities of border relations surface in the transborder policing, the historical references to Crossland and past wars, and the photos that serve as a trope for connecting past to present. In contrast to the social and historical project in Partners that at times catches itself in a web of nostalgia, none of the characters in Policeman longs for an earlier Klail City in which life was imagined to be simpler. Not even in a nostalgic daydream does one of them muse over restoring a social order that predates the nineteenth-century incursion of the United States into Mexico. Earlier volumes in the kcdt series, like Korean Love Songs, as Ramón Saldívar correctly observes, held ‘‘off the dissolving and fragmenting effects of contemporary American life while attempting to represent the conditions necessary for the retention of organic community life’’ (147). Policeman offers no such hope. ASK A POLICEMAN

If Partners asked us to consider the way ‘‘this artificial economy’’ had begun to impact social relations in South Texas, Policeman explores how nearly two decades of drug traffic and a ‘‘war on drugs’’ have thoroughly transformed the Valley.18 It is the apotheosis of the death trip BROWN GUMSHOES

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on which Hinojosa has brought the reader. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that this novel is not the end of the kcdt series. Part of the toll for this trip is the destruction of family for the sake of avarice. The instrumental rationality that Horkheimer considered so much a part of advanced capitalism is also part of the drug trade. Even when reason has been superceded by an instrumental rationality whose sole aim is efficiency, it cannot be the ultimate trump card in maintaining order because while the police work at becoming more efficient, so too do the criminals. The very technologies used to maintain order (that watchword of the procedural) can also be used to streamline drug smuggling or any other illegal operation. Technology, in other words, cannot be assumed to work solely in the service of the police. The lesson of the procedural is not one of chaos subordinated to order, but one of relations of force that can never be contained. Hence it is much more productive to ferret out social relations using a Foucaultian notion of power, one that understands power as a series of relationships of force that are not just negative, but productive. Power is not an institution, but ‘‘a complex strategical situation’’ (Sexuality 93).19 This concept of power strikes me as much more capable of explaining power relations in their fullest complexity than a binary model that locates power at two distinct poles, namely those of oppressor and oppressed. Moreover, attempts to win once and for all in the game of power through an escalation of State force seems officious at best. Moving tanks along the border, as the district attorney hopes to do in Policeman, does not make the State more efficient or the ultimate victor. Rather it manifests the hostile and expeditious attitude of the United States toward its sovereign neighbor. In addition, the drug trade helps expose the brutality of all capitalist enterprises that advance an economic bottom line over human social relations. Trafficking drugs, illegal though it may be, has a management and labor structure not unlike most corporations, the difference being that many are willing to decry the immorality of drugs, but not the human suffering attendant to numerous other industries. In other words, the drug trade baldly exposes the harshness that comes from extracting surplus value from labor. No one, myself included, would argue that the destructive force of cocaine and the sweatshop manufacturing of athletic shoes are strictly equivalent. But the production process in both of these industries depends on an economic bottom line that privileges those higher in the corporate pecking order over the workers at the bottom. It is just that the visible cruelty of the drug trade ROLANDO HINOJOSA’S KCDT SERIES

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makes that disparity more painfully present. I want to focus, then, on how this socioeconomic order displaces the unifying function of family in favor of a rational efficiency. Ultimately, Policeman is a parable about greed, a story of a society that has reached the zenith of reification. All social relations are reduced to commodity relations. In all mysteries, it is the role of the detective to determine that the suspect has the means, opportunity, and motive to commit the crime. In Policeman, where an ‘‘artificial drug economy’’ has reached its apex and emblematizes all business transactions, means and opportunity remain open questions, but motive has only one answer: profit. Hinojosa paints a bleak picture, but it is one that is in concert with the late-capitalist social relations in the Valley. It is all profit all the time. How does this motive articulate to other dominant trends in the novel—policing, violence, family, and, of course, banks and drugs? The operative question is the one Buenrostro ponders as he tries to make sense of the drug ring and the recent murders: ‘‘Who profited from all this?’’ (173). A quick review of the key events in Policeman will prepare us to ascertain the connections between these dominant trends and the profit motive. By the end of Partners, we know that the Gómez Solís brothers were implicated in the drug ring responsible for the murders at the Kum Bak Inn. In that novel, however, they managed to elude the U.S. police. It is hard to determine exactly how many years have passed between Partners and Policeman, but since Policeman is set in the early 1990s, Lee, the former police captain, and Felipe have been on the lam for roughly two decades. By the opening of Policeman, however, Lee is no longer a fugitive. He sits in a Belken County courthouse cell awaiting trial. Felipe short-circuits that process when he sends hired hands to bust Lee out. He then has Lee flown back to Mexico, only to kill him so that Felipe and his sons/nephews can take over the drug trade. (Although they do not know it, twins José Antonio and Juan Carlos are Lee’s children, but Felipe had raised them as his own when their mother suffered a mental breakdown.) Working with Lu Cetina, the new head of the Barrones police force, Rafe and the homicide squad set out to recapture Felipe and Lee, the latter of whom they do not realize has been murdered. They are, in other words, still trying to break up the drug cartel, and Rafe still has an interest in avenging the Kum Bak Inn murder of his friend Gus Elder. Before this transborder coalition of police can bring the Gómez Solís

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clan to justice, however, Hinojosa throws another wrinkle into the narrative. In an especially violent episode, Eduardo Salinas (the son of Enrique Salinas, whom Lee had double-crossed in Partners) lays the Gómez Solíses and their ranch to waste. José Antonio manages to escape and returns to the Valley to pursue his interest in Laura Castañon Grayson (the wife of the pilot who flew Lee back to Mexico after the jailbreak and who was subsequently murdered by Felipe). After a standoff at a brothel in Barrones, the novel ends with the transborder police coalition capturing José Antonio and Lu Cetina promising to bring Eduardo Salinas to justice for the murders at the Gómez Solís ranch. The cumulative effect of the crimes is that the Valley seems unalterably corrupted. The world is hardly restored to order; this is a temporary fix. More disorder looms on the horizon, a vintage procedural ending. Indeed, the novel even indicates that someone new will take over the Gómez Solís drug ring. Though he wrote more than half a century before Policeman, Horkheimer’s thoughts on how the economy levels social relations prove rather revealing for understanding the late-twentieth-century Valley. He writes, Objects could be regarded as an unqualified mass in philosophy because economic reality had levelled them, rendering all things equivalent to money as the common denominator. In the face of such levelling, the proper being of the object is no longer taken into account. Cognition thus becomes that which registers the objects and proceeds to interpret the quantified expressions of them. The less human beings think of reality in qualitative terms, the more susceptible reality becomes to manipulation. Its objects are neither understood nor respected. (31)

Certainly this quantification of all relations and the rendering of all things in terms of their monetary rate of exchange has been at the very heart of the kcdt series. Prior to the Rafe Buenrostro mysteries, however, this reified world seemed somehow tempered in the novels. In Policeman, by contrast, it occupies center stage. The commodification of human relations is anticipated in Partners: the narrator comments, ‘‘Money. A curious thing, money, he thought. Now there’s something without a sense of humor. And ninety-five percent of the people who work for it sure as hell don’t know how to use it. Not fully, anyway’’ (155). Money runs people and not the other way around. People understand each other as markers on an economic line. This should not be

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taken as an argument about false consciousness, for these Klail Citians are quite aware of the economic relations that surround them, and that is precisely the point—there is no outside to the system, and Policeman renders that with unforgiving clarity. The Gómez Solís family shows us how the profit motive attaches itself to that staple of Mexicana/o and Chicana/o culture—the family.20 Even the family cannot escape the leveling effects of the economy. Brother sells out brother, and sons kill their uncle/father for nothing more than a larger share of the drug profits. The narrative of Policeman is one of control and avarice, the watchwords of business success. Felipe rescues Lee only so that he might more efficiently and covertly dispose of him. José Antonio and Juan Carlos join in the bloodbath because their lives, too, have been caught in the drug ring’s web of treachery. As Dorson quips, ‘‘They killed Lee, just like that. Some family’’ (111). Even the wives have become alienated from the family structure. When Lu Cetina calls Felipe’s and Lee’s wives, they hang up on her. They want nothing to do with the men or the twins, and as the narrator notes, ‘‘This was strange. Most Mexican families would do anything to keep in touch; not in this case though’’ (173). It is not as if every Mexicana/o and Chicana/o family crumbles under the extant set of social relations. Indeed, a wealth of sociological data demonstrates that this is not the case. Hinojosa’s narrative, however, is suggestive of the potential these social relations under an advanced capitalism have for leveling all sorts of human relations, and by going after a supposedly sacrosanct institution like the family, the narrative suggests the powerful reach of social and economic forces. Hinojosa offers the Salinases as an antidote to this family disintegration. Recall that Eduardo Salinas destroys the Gómez Solís ranch to avenge his father Enrique, whom Lee had sold out to the police. Not that this is the healthy family model to follow, but the episode illustrates the familial sense of loyalty and responsibility in keeping with the image of the tightly knit Mexicana/o family. In this regard, the Salinas family is more consonant with the Anglo power structure depicted in the kcdt series via the Klail-Blanchard-Cooke family triumvirate, the three families who have stood by each other to maintain power over the Valley.21 Again though, this family has placed economic wellbeing over any more hospitable and loving relations that might sustain them. Thus, even though there are intact familial relationships, they exist solely to advance the economic interests of the clan and are just as reified as any of the other relations depicted in the narrative. BROWN GUMSHOES

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The very violence of the crimes Hinojosa depicts in Policeman illustrates the apocalyptic dimension of this final installment of the kcdt series. But these are not bank robberies or corrupt bank tellers caught in a money-laundering scheme. Rather, Hinojosa charges up the depiction of violence to its fullest load. The brutality resonates with the extreme horror in Jim Thompson’s crime novels or Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer stories. It is a world in which violence reigns and is not merely gratuitous but suggestive of the reified and alienated world that has become the Valley. It is a primal fight for territory and capital. As the narrator points out, the ‘‘weapon of choice’’ in the Valley has become the Uzi (7), an automatic assault rifle with no other aim except killing. The robbery of the pawnshop further illustrates this revved-up violence. In the narrative logic of Policeman, it is not enough for the men to hold up the store. Rather, Hinojosa depicts the robbery as follows: ‘‘The minivan shot out toward the pawnshop and crashed through the front window. The driver revved the motor and put the engine on neutral. The falling glass was followed by the crashing of the van into the middle of the store amid the cries of frightened customers. Some of them hit the floor. As they did so, the driver ran over them at full force. He then put the van in reverse and ran over the bodies again’’ (127). Life means nothing in this scenario. Like a supply shelf or a partition, clerks and customers are just obstacles in the way, standing between the robbers and their booty—munitions needed to further the drug trade. Hinojosa employs a similar narrative violence in describing Eduardo Salinas’s destruction of the Gómez Solís ranch and, later, the capture of José Antonio. The conscious decision to write a detective story that resonates with the excessive violence of a Quentin Tarantino film illuminates the uniting thread of the novel: the profit motive.Violence, greed, and capital accumulation come before all else and at any cost. The logic even infiltrates the officials who are supposed to maintain order, but want only to militarize the border. This militarization returns us to that realm in which rational instrumentality replaces reason, where efficiency is the name of the game. Indeed, the district attorney imagines the purchase of tanks as the ultimate move in an efficiently patrolled border. His response to the escalation of violence in the Valley is more a posture than a real solution, and it is ironized when Hauer, of the homicide squad, visits Art Styles at the U.S. Immigration Service headquarters. Hauer muses over the proliferation of federal agencies along the border: ROLANDO HINOJOSA’S KCDT SERIES

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Art Styles’ office stood in the middle of the east wing of the first floor complex. Hauer passed through U.S. Customs, DEA, and assorted offices before coming to Immigration itself. He looked at the bulletin board and noticed there were some twenty different offices and administrations that were stationed along the border. One of the bureaus was that of Indian Affairs; Hauer wondered where the nearest Indians were. Probably up in Eagle Pass, he thought, some two hundred fifty miles up river. He smiled as he remembered Sam Dorson’s oft-repeated adage: ‘‘The federal trough is longer than the Rio Grande. Trouble is, the trough doesn’t wash out in the Gulf.’’ (32–33)

As Hauer’s glib thought about the Indian Affairs office underscores, the push for efficiency runs smack up against the reality of bureaucracy. Or, as I maintain, it must confront the hypocrisy of the politicians and elected officials such as the district attorney, who spout all sorts of xenophobic cant about policing the borders while knowing full well that the health of the U.S. economy depends on a cheap workforce that can be exploited both in Mexico and in the United States. Much like the leveled-out social relations that attend an advanced capitalist regime, the political rhetoric and sloganeering around the border seek to reify social relations to the extent that for a significant portion of the U.S. populace, Mexicans and Chicana/os are fully dehumanized. The legacy of anti-Mexican racism is alive and well in the United States, and much of that hate is maintained through the very antiseptic distance that Hinojosa’s narrator spoke of in Partners. Latina/o immigrants are rarely given a human face in the mainstream media. Rather they are turned into dehumanized signifiers like ‘‘aliens,’’ ‘‘wetbacks,’’ or ‘‘illegals,’’ thereby becoming perfect scapegoats for whatever political or economic crisis the nation faces. Compared to the other novels in this study, Hinojosa subordinates the development of the individual to that of socioeconomic relations. His two procedurals, however, highlight the very economic and social conditions that gave rise to the reexamination of Chicana/o cultural identities. They depict the force with which capital has been intensifying since the late 1970s, and to that extent they illustrate the social conditions with which Chicana/os grappled as they sought to better understand the complex nature of their identities and the discourses that shaped them. As I argued earlier, Partners is ultimately a nostalgic novel that wants to reimagine a reunified Greater Mexico, but at every turn the characters recognize the impossibility of this task, leading to an overwhelming degree of nostalgia and despair. While Hinojosa’s

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characters never explicitly articulate a claim for a reunified Greater Mexico, that desire, like so many unstated but deeply felt desires, is legible in the traces of the past that surface in photographs and characterizations of old times. Policeman takes the situation a step further and brings the kcdt series to a rather apocalyptic finale. Here there are no hopes of a larger cultural dream. Everything is sacrificed to the greater cause of efficiency, the mantra of instrumental rationality. The motive for the crimes and the motive for existence have only one answer—profit. Profit is the connective tissue among family, policing, violence, and the border. This bleak outlook keeps with the tradition of the procedural genre. As Leroy L. Panek observes of the procedural, ‘‘Depravity, cruelty, greed, and the dark abscesses of the soul confront the police with evil beyond their capacity to restrain or understand’’ (170). Reading the novels through the lens of the procedural form and instrumental rationality helps make sense of this rampant violence and the cool, calculating subjects who partake in it. Finally, while Hinojosa’s detective novels do not illustrate the multiple identities Chicana/os mobilize in the post-nationalist period, they nevertheless contribute to our understanding of that period’s economic and social conditions. Mapping out the dominant social and economic ground of the contemporary moment in Partners and Policeman provides a firmer basis for understanding the identifications of individual Chicana/o subjects. As Michael Nava’s Henry Rios series shows, these subjects draw on the possibilities and constraints of post-nationalism to articulate their identities.

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chapter 2

MICHAEL NAVA’S HENRY RIOS SERIES YOU CAN’T STEP IN THE SAME RÍO TWICE

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus’s aphorism that one cannot step in the same river twice captures the fluid nature of history and identity. A body of water can, of course, be mapped and thereby identified. It is, after all, an ultimately finite, describable whole, but because it is always in motion no particular place in the water is ever the same. Thus the ever-flowing river perfectly thematizes the nature of the protean self. This chapter’s title means to capture the paradox of fixed place name and fluid substance/substantiality, the body made whole, but the body ever moving, always changing, and to connect that paradox to the identity formation of Michael Nava’s protagonist Henry Rios, the lawyer-cum–amateur sleuth. The pun, however, is not just a moment of linguistic jouissance; its pleasure is its resonant meaning for the multiply forming self of Michael Nava’s hero, Henry Rios. His identity is most stable and clearly articulated, even if constantly besieged, when he is portrayed as a gay lawyer. It becomes more vexing and slippery when Nava depicts the imbrication of Henry’s racial and sexual identities, especially as these come together around family and home. The seven volumes that compose the Henry Rios series—The Little Death (1986), Goldenboy (1988), How Town (1990), The Hidden Law (1992), The Death of Friends (1996), The Burning Plain (1997), and Rag and Bone (2001)—make Nava’s the largest single corpus of Chicana or Chicano detective fiction and the most sustained inquiry into the shaping discourses of Chicana/o identity. Throughout the novels, Henry must construct his identities through the discourses of family, race, sexuality, and home. Each of these shaping forces poses substantial challenges to this gay, post-nationalist, Chicano subject.Via an intense scrutiny of these discourses, Michael Nava creates a character who

through his alienated stance looks awry at the controlling structures that have had a hegemonic hold over the Chicana/o imaginary and that through their heteronormativity have stifled the multiple ways the Chicana/o subject identifies. Nava himself noted that he began writing mysteries because they seemed like an ‘‘especially appropriate vehicle to explore the experience of being gay in this culture because, at least in the American tradition of crime writing, the protagonist is an outsider looking in, which describes the experience of most homosexual men and women’’ (Forrest). From this alienated stance, Henry acts as an optic to show how racial and sexual identities play out both in the contemporary United States (Los Angeles and the Bay Area in particular) and specifically in Chicana/o communities. In addition, it is only in queering the forces of family, home, race, and sexuality that one can disarticulate them from the naturalizing, heteronormative logic that underwrites them, that makes them seem necessary rather than contingent or constructed. To this end I examine how the formation of Henry’s racial and sexualized identities intersects with the discourses and practices surrounding home and family. Ultimately, the discourses of race and sexuality compel us to rethink static notions of familia and home and to imagine them anew. Race, family, sexuality, and home are not easily disentangled, and if I separate them out for analysis it is not to suggest that that is how they are lived; I pull them apart only to understand and analyze how they are all mutually constitutive. For too long, a discussion of the importance of Chicano homosexuality has been lacking in Chicana/o politics and culture. It is as if one must conceal one’s homosexuality to be counted as Chicano. Take, for instance, the publishing history of John Rechy’s City of Night (1963). Although one of the first published novels featuring a gay Chicano protagonist, City of Night was, as Frederick Aldama notes, not ‘‘marketed as a Chicano text.’’ It was ‘‘sold not as Chicano but queer [as if the two needed to be separated]: a banner proclaiming City of Night ‘The Great Novel of the Gay World’ splashes across the 1973 Ballantine paperback edition’’ (‘‘Ethnoqueer’’ 600).1 For years, moreover, Rechy’s work remained untouched by Chicana/o scholars.2 This critical neglect is only one of the many illustrative examples of how discussions of Chicana/o homosexuality have been suppressed. It has been a decade and a half since Tomás Almaguer noted the striking dearth of writings on Chicano gay men, yet the absence of critical attention to this topic still reigns in contemporary scholarMICHAEL NAVA’S HENRY RIOS SERIES

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ship. Almaguer notes that the crucial failure in the extant work on Chicano homosexuality is that ‘‘unlike the writings on Chicana lesbianism, however, these works fail to discuss directly the cultural dissonance that Chicano homosexual men confront in reconciling their primary socialization into Chicano family life with the sexual norms of the dominant culture.’’ He continues, ‘‘They offer little to our understanding of how these men negotiate the different ways these cultural systems stigmatize homosexuality and how they incorporate these messages into their adult sexual practices’’ (256). While more ethnographic and sociological studies of Chicano homosexuality are needed, Nava’s Henry Rios series creates a foundation upon which the issues of race, sexuality, family, and home vis-à-vis Chicano homosexuals can be built.3 We should begin with the matter of Henry’s identity as Chicano. Nava never articulates that identity for Henry in the first novel of the series, The Little Death. Readers know from his surname, Rios, that Henry has some Hispanic heritage, but Nava subordinates it to Henry’s identity as a gay lawyer throughout The Little Death. It is only halfway through the second novel, Goldenboy, that Henry is ethnically marked, and only then through a racist slur. One of the principal characters, Zane, says to Henry, ‘‘You’re too good-looking to be a lawyer. You look more like a wetback gigolo’’ (112). Though racially marked by another character, Henry himself has not affirmed his ethnicity as vital to his identity. Nava does an exemplary job exploring Henry’s homosexuality in both novels. Indeed, in his survey of gay and lesbian mystery fiction, Anthony Slide declares that Nava is ‘‘the best of the new gay, mainstream writers, and a worthy successor to Joseph Hansen [who authored the twelve-volume, twenty-year-long David Brandstetter series]’’ (1071).4 In developing Henry’s gay identity, Nava places him in romantic homosexual relationships, and with other characters, Henry identifies as gay and affirms that identity. Nava, however, does not examine how Henry’s race and sexuality intersect in the first two novels; not until the third novel, How Town, is Henry hailed as a Chicano. The first instance comes during an exchange with his friend Terry Ormes, a captain in the San Francisco Police Department. Explaining that Henry is just as brave as his AIDS-infected lover Josh, Terry addresses the three most prominent features of Henry’s identity—sexuality, profession, and ethnicity. She consoles Henry: ‘‘So are you [brave]. A gay pub-

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lic figure, a criminal defense lawyer and a Chicano—you didn’t choose the easy road, either’’ (21). While Terry’s comment illustrates how these three facets of Henry’s identity mutually inform one another, they get their most forceful and compelling investigation in The Hidden Law. This is the first novel in the series that sustains an explicit and prolonged investigation into the intersection of race and sexuality, which stays at the forefront of the novel because Nava constructs the plot around Henry’s defense of a Chicano politician, California state senator Gus Peña, who has been charged with murder for killing a man while driving drunk. Before Henry can take the case to court, however, Peña is gunned down, and Henry finds himself defending another Chicano, Michael Ruiz. In structuring the novel around these two clients, Nava keeps Henry squarely engaged with the Chicana/o community. As a point of contrast, consider that in other novels in the series Nava establishes Henry’s racial identity more obliquely, through language use and food preferences. In How Town, for example, Henry walks into a Mexican café, and the following conversation ensues: ‘‘Algo a beber?’’ she [the waitress] asked. ‘‘A Coke,’’ I replied. Scanning the menu quickly, I added. ‘‘Un plato de pozole.’’ She grinned her golden grin. ‘‘Muy bien.’’ A few minutes later she brought the bowl of pozole, a stew of grits and pork, some tortillas, and my Coke. I thanked her and set about eating a dish I’d last tasted years ago in my mother’s kitchen. (220)

The use of Spanish and traditional Mexican cuisine marks Henry racially. Nava uses language and food, that is, as two of the key cultural determinants of Henry’s Chicano identity. We also know from this same novel, however, that Henry, like many Chicana/os, does not trust his Spanish (160). If his faulty Spanish throws the reader off, Nava offers Henry’s history of eating pozole as a means to establish his racial heritage. Pointing out that he consumed this food at home as a youth ensures that the reader does not mistake Henry for an ethnic tourist. Like the Coke he drinks, Henry is the ‘‘real thing.’’ Juxtaposed with non-plot-driven episodes that situate Henry racially, such as the café exchange, scenes in The Hidden Law unravel the complexities of Henry’s multiple identities by keeping him explicitly engaged with Chicana/o politics, electoral and otherwise—a much

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tougher terrain. Here, Henry must battle for his racial identity within the Chicana/o community, where his homosexuality is often stigmatized as an undesirable feature. Moreover, his racial identity, in conjunction with his sexual identity, creates a heightened sense of dis-ease for him, which manifests itself in the opening pages of the novel. While at a city hall hearing in Los Angeles to discuss Senator Peña’s anti-gang bill, Henry is approached by Tomás Ochoa, a Chicano studies professor at a local college. As Ochoa nears, Henry recalls their last interaction at a panel discussion on AIDS: ‘‘While the rest of us deplored the indifference with which minority political leaders had responded to the presence of AIDS among their constituents, Ochoa took the position that it only affected elements of the minority communities which they were better off without, homosexuals and drug users’’ (4–5). Ochoa refuses to apprehend the sexual diversity of Chicana/o communities and, equally insidious, he pathologizes and criminalizes homosexuality by equating it with illicit drug use. While it would be reductive to claim that Ochoa metonymically represents the Chicana/o community, the problem of racial alienation because of one’s homosexuality is indeed one that has long ensnared the Chicana/o community.5 Lest we get tripped up and isolate homophobia to the Chicana/o community, Nava offers numerous examples throughout the series of the hostilities homosexuals encounter on a daily basis. In The Burning Plain, for instance, Nava examines the impunity with which anyone can carry out hate crimes against homosexuals. It is significant, however, that in The Hidden Law, the one novel in which Nava keeps an overt discussion of Chicano politics in the fore, he employs a Chicano character as the locus for sexual animosity. Moreover, in a series which only just established Henry’s Chicano identity (in the novel preceding The Hidden Law), we see how that racial identity does not ensure a safe place for all Chicana/os; indeed, because of the homophobia in the Chicana/o community, Henry’s racial and sexual identities can be pitted against one another by hatemongers like Ochoa. Following Henry’s reminiscence about last seeing Ochoa, the two get into another heated exchange, and Ochoa impugns Henry’s homosexuality. Henry then concludes, ‘‘I watched him disappear into the sea of brown and black faces in the room, with the depressing certainty that he spoke for most of them. Whatever their other disagreements, the races all united in their contempt for people of my kind’’ (5). In-

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stances such as this situate Henry as the alien other and reveal Nava’s project of critiquing ‘‘compulsory heterosexuality’’ 6 and its tenets of exclusion. In this regard, his project resonates with Sonia SaldívarHull’s claims about Chicanas looking ‘‘into the gaps, lapses, and absences in the masculinist discourses that have written women out of their historical agency’’ (53). Looking into these gaps is not about proffering easy answers to complex problems. For instance, about a third of the way through The Hidden Law, Henry makes clear that there is not going to be a tidy resolution to the racial and sexual antinomies that structure his life and those of so many others. Reflecting on how difficult it must have been for a working-class Mexican American like Senator Peña to succeed in power politics, Henry muses, ‘‘I could imagine all this because I had traversed the same trajectory. The difference was, being homosexual as well as Chicano, I’d had to learn a level of self-acceptance that mitigated my anger’’ (64). No easy solutions and no final peace, just a lessening, a mitigation of the anger. The power of this novel for understanding the complexities of postnationalist identifications is that it shows how complicated the processes of identification are and how the discourses that shape us, that come together in one subject, may indeed find themselves at odds. As Nava states of his own complicated identity, ‘‘I have spent my life being uncomfortable. [. . .] As assimilated as I am, I have never for one day forgotten who I am and what I am: a homosexual Latino, never fully at ease in either group’’ (Zonana). Rather than accept that condition, we need to pry open preconceived conceptions of race and homosexuality so that we might attempt to find more affirming and amenable spaces. The absence of Henry’s racial identity in the first two novels thus occludes a rich understanding of how race and sexuality come together and carry a rhetorical and material force for understanding social, cultural, and political relations. In the subsequent five novels, however, Nava undoubtedly constructs a multiply determined subject in his protagonist, asking us to consider the many ways the various facets of his identity intersect and to question the heteronormativity that runs rampant in Chicana/o culture. This questioning and queering forces an understanding of the multiple and heterogeneous subjects colligated under the ‘‘homogenous’’ signifier ‘‘Chicano.’’ As Michael Hames-García correctly notes, Nava’s work ‘‘demands that we consider Henry’s claim to a multiply constructed identity as having consequences not only for himself and others like him but also for others

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who are straight and/or not Chicano’’ (114). In considering those demands, I will look at how Nava constructs Rios’s multiply informed identity. The opening novel of the series, The Little Death, unequivocally situates the two elements that will govern the series and that must be attended to in order to understand the force of Nava’s project. These elements are the construction and function of family, and Henry’s identity crisis. Early in the first chapter, Henry prepares to quit his job as a public defender. He feels he can offer no real assistance to his clients, and that he is merely ‘‘dispensing placebos to the terminally ill’’ (22). He tells his supervisor, ‘‘I know I’m a little old for it [he is 33], but I believe I’m having an identity crisis’’ (23). Yet he claims he is not ‘‘demoralized or exhausted from work’’; rather it is the ‘‘rest of [his] life [he’s] burnt out on’’ (21). Thus, from the very beginning of the series, Nava casts Henry in the role of the dis-eased self. Then, in an important narrative move, Nava links the basis of Henry’s crisis to the very source of the mystery he must investigate, namely a twisted family plot. Henry’s first case, that is, forces him to examine the dysfunctional family dynamic at the root of the murder of Hugh Paris, who was both Henry’s client and subsequently his lover. The plot revolves around a complicated affair involving the wealthy Linden-Smith-Paris family chain. As the reader learns over the course of the novel, each murder deals with preserving the ‘‘integrity’’ and wealth of the Linden family name. This family line is so important and powerful in the narrative that Nava even provides a Linden family tree in the prefatory material of the novel. Thus an isomorphism obtains between the plot of the first novel and Henry’s own identity crisis, which, as we discover throughout the series, is tied to issues of family, race, and sexuality. In this initial novel, then, Nava sets before us the central thematic issues that inform the entire Henry Rios series. Before working through the argument about family and home, I want to underscore that to understand the complexity of Henry’s identity is to recall that it is never a given. He must always battle for every claim he wants to make on his racial and sexual identities. The way others respond to his race and homosexuality creates endless turmoil for him. It is not that Henry is struggling to find an Archimedean point outside of the discourses that structure his identities—he repeatedly demonstrates that you cannot will yourself free from the discourses that surround you. He is a textual reminder of Michel Foucault’s analysis of the relationship between power and resistance. ‘‘Where there is power, BROWN GUMSHOES

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there is resistance,’’ notes Foucault, ‘‘and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’’ (History of Sexuality 95).7 You have to work within this web of forces to identify yourself, and it is through this same web of forces that others come to identify you, to hail you: ‘‘When I was a child,’’ Henry observes, ‘‘I had worked hard at making myself invisible and I emerged from it without an identity,’’ but then he goes on to note how over time he ‘‘crafted one for [him]self’’ (Hidden Law 75).8 This battle for identity highlights Ricardo Ortiz’s claim that Nava recognizes that identity ‘‘is fundamentally an effect of the self’s troubled relation to memory and desire’’ (123). Henry must navigate, that is, the terrain between present attacks on his identity as well as past assaults stemming from his family. His homosexual desires make him a subject both alien to his family and culturally displaced among the heteronormative assumptions and homophobic assaults in the contemporary United States: ‘‘My empathy for my clients must come from my own half-submerged feeling of being constantly on trial and having to establish my normality over and over in the face of the presumption that gays are freaks and monsters’’ (Burning Plain 92). One might contend that we all struggle to find our identities and work within a set of shaping discourses that at times welcome us and at other times reject us. I would certainly not disavow that claim, but I want to accentuate the necessity for and the difficulty in claiming an identity for racial and sexual minorities in a country in which racism and homophobia pervade social relations. In his appraisal of Joseph Hansen’s gay detective series starring David Brandstetter, Roger Bromley remarks on this struggle: ‘‘Hansen’s narratives form part of a 1970s cultural mediation of gay visibility beyond the public stereotype of limp-wristed ‘queen,’ particularly important to a generation (which Brandstetter symbolizes) confined by subterfuge and invisibility’’ (108– 109).9 Further, the counsel Henry’s Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor offers him underscores this feeling of being under attack: ‘‘You know, Henry, we’re the only people who get born into the enemy camp. I mean black babies get born into black families, Jewish babies get born into Jewish families, but gay babies, we get born into straight families. How we survive at all is a miracle’’ (Hidden Law 77). While this may too easily binarize social relations between heterosexuals and homosexuals and mistakenly presume lines of solidarity based on identity, the sentiment of the idea illuminates one of the key difficulties Henry faces: his parents, his father in particular, have disowned him because MICHAEL NAVA’S HENRY RIOS SERIES

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of his homosexuality. His lesbian sister Elena compares their childhood to a ‘‘concentration camp’’ (How Town 145). In working through his multiply inflected identity, Henry must return time and again to the space of the home and family to locate his identity, to recover that past of forgetting, that absence of memory, for his natal family has been the very site of his loss of identity, his living without memory. Moreover, Henry’s is not an exceptional, aberrant, or anomalous case, which makes this argument especially important. His struggles are all too familiar for homosexual Chicana/os, and his characterization creates a better comprehension of the struggles over a homosexual Chicano identity and how they intersect with the practices of home and familia that hold such a powerful place in Chicana/o communities. For too long familia has been treated as the bastion of Mexican American culture, a refuge from which the encroachment of the ‘‘dominant’’ culture and its multiple oppressions might be escaped. I am less provoked by the reductive simplicity of the binary opposition between ‘‘dominant’’ and ‘‘subordinate’’ than by the notion that familia is a safe haven, outside of society’s structuring power relations. Understood in this manner, ‘‘familia’’ has been an operative trope for forming Chicana/o social movements. Drawing on the rhetoric of familia, however, once again misses the multiple ways in which family can be oppressive and how it generates nostalgia for a structure that can supposedly save us from the wicked world. More than a decade ago, Norma Alarcón instructed us to be wary of the family structure and the ‘‘crisis of meaning’’ its ‘‘engendering process’’ created for the ‘‘female-speaking subject that would want to speak from a different position than that of a mother, or a future wife/mother’’ (‘‘Making ‘Familia’ ’’ 148). Drawing on Kristeva’s critique of the symbolic contract, Alarcón offered a new course for the ‘‘dissident (female) speaking subject’’: ‘‘The speaking subject today,’’ she wrote, ‘‘has to position herself at the margins of the ‘symbolic contract’ and refuse to accept definitions of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ in order to transform the contract’’ (157). This transformation would help us to ‘‘make familia from scratch.’’ I propose not a making of familia from scratch, but a scratching of familia. I suggest that we place the term familia under erasure, in a Derridean sense. It is an important signifier for discussing certain personal and social relations, but at the same time it can never do all the work many Chicana/os want it to do. It is both excess and lack. It is complete BROWN GUMSHOES

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with significations that exceed its lexical and material boundaries, yet simultaneously never replete enough to fulfill the political, social, cultural, and economic ends to which it is set. In placing familia under erasure, however, I argue that despite its shortcomings, walking away from family would be premature. I advocate not for the singular, heteronormative definition of family that dominates mainstream representations, but for the creation of new sets of relations and new lines of personal connection that offer us a language and practice of possibilities for constructing family. In thinking through and beyond familia, Nava’s queering of family helps us see ways in which rather than giving up familia, we can reinvent it so as to think past what Michel Foucault identifies as the poverty of relational possibilities that saddle us.10 In response to a lover who told him that a homosexual couple could not have the things a heterosexual couple could (‘‘a family, a career, mak[ing] a difference in the world’’), Henry states, ‘‘We can create a different kind of life. We can make new places’’ (Death of Friends 24). Moments like these point to possibilities for hopping out of that saddle that constrains our relational possibilities. Some might say that the family is an inherently oppressive and conservative structure and that attempts to imagine it otherwise are doomed to fail. Indeed, in the introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet (1993), Michael Warner avers: ‘‘In a culture dominated by talk of ‘family values,’ the outlook is grim for any hope that child-rearing institutions of home and state can become less oppressive’’ (xvi). Writing at a time when the Republican Party was promoting a sterile and hateful notion of family, Warner seems overwhelmed by the period’s orthodoxy. Nevertheless, to abandon ‘‘family’’ strikes me as wrong. First, doing so replicates a mistake too often made in leftist politics: conceding otherwise crucial political terrain because of its conservative lines of articulation. Rather than yielding that ground, we need to disarticulate ‘‘family’’ from its connections to the belligerent Bush-era family values crusade and ‘‘reterritorialize’’ 11 the concept to enable more productive work, such as affirming new notions of community and solidarity. Further, familia needs to have its connections broken from the overdetermined relations of patriarchy that have prevailed in the Chicana/o community. Second, summarily dismissing ‘‘family’’ fails to take seriously the importance of reimagining family as a fruitful site of politically powerful group relations. Rather than concede more territory to institutions MICHAEL NAVA’S HENRY RIOS SERIES

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that continue to sterilize and restrict personal connections, we must at every turn ‘‘reterritorialize’’ family and create new relational possibilities: ‘‘We should try to imagine and create a new relational right that permits all possible types of relations to exist and not be prevented, blocked, or annulled by impoverished relational institutions’’ (Foucault, ‘‘Social Triumph’’ 158). Nava offers us one such opportunity to do so. The seven novels of the Henry Rios series show a movement from birth families as sites of hostility and turmoil for homosexual youth to a reassembling of family otherwise in the series-ending Rag and Bone. This final novel offers a representative sample of the concerns and foci that animate the entire series. Rag and Bone begins by positioning Henry as a man alone in the world. His parents are dead; he is estranged from his only sister, Elena; his lover, Josh, has died of AIDS; and as he recovers from his recent heart attack, he is overwhelmed with feelings of loneliness. His isolation gives way when he meets a new love interest, John De León, and when he reconnects with his sister, Elena, who needs help with her estranged and battered daughter Vicky and Vicky’s son, Angelito. Indeed, it is around Vicky and Angelito that the mystery of Rag and Bone revolves. When Vicky and Angelito disappear from Elena’s house without a note, Elena enlists Henry’s help to track them down. Things take a turn for the worse when Henry finds the two at a roadside hotel with Pete, Vicky’s husband, who has just been murdered. The novel leads us through a series of red herrings; first we believe Vicky killed Pete, and then the suspicion falls on Angelito. Finally, we learn that Pete’s cousin Butch killed him for turning state’s evidence against him. In this web of turmoil, Elena and Henry try to weave together a new family for the Rioses, an interesting challenge in light of Vicky’s religious hostility toward homosexuality, specifically Elena’s lesbianism and Henry’s homosexuality, not to mention the young (ten years old) Angelito’s confusion over family loyalties. As Nava thinks through the constitutive connections of familia, we come to understand why it must be placed under erasure, not abandoned. Only partially conceding that the book’s ‘‘paramount issue [is] family,’’ Nava asserts that ‘‘you can legitimately read it that way but my intention was not to deliver a meditation on family so much as on the way people choose, or don’t choose, to be connected to one another. In fact, I would say that just as important as the theme of family are BROWN GUMSHOES

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the themes of ethnicity, class, and gender and how those affect connections’’ (Forrest). Nava’s interest in the way people choose to connect is fundamental to thinking beyond the poverty of relations. More specifically, the people Henry tries to connect to in Rag and Bone both constitute a family and demonstrate his need for one, belying Nava’s assertion that the novel is about personal connections in general. One could spend time analyzing how people make connections in any variety of ways (e.g., as coworkers, as friends, as activists, etc.), but Nava does not undertake just any assemblage of people in Rag and Bone. He examines what constitutes family. Nava’s quote also illustrates a slippage in his thinking about ethnicity, class, and gender, as if they are somehow mutually exclusive from family. These categories are not only ‘‘just as important as the theme of family,’’ but are inextricably linked together. One cannot think about family without taking up ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, which are fundamental to the constitution of any family. In contradistinction to the heteronormative family of a mother, father, and children, Henry tries to pull together an immediate family out of friends and extended family, folks who would otherwise fall outside the boundaries of the ‘‘traditional’’ nuclear family. The family Rios imagines in Rag and Bone would consist of himself, a gay man in his late forties; his new lover, John De León; Henry’s lesbian sister Elena and her partner, Joanne; the estranged daughter Vicky, whom Elena gave up for adoption; and Vicky’s ten-year-old son, Angelito. This assemblage of characters can only be defined as beyond the pale of ‘‘family,’’ if one falls prey to the tyranny of the heteronormative family and considers all other familial groupings as a definitional lack. If this is the cast that represents familia for Henry, what are the practices that constitute them as such? One such practice is the practice of home.12 By ‘‘practice of home’’ I mean the daily tasks one engages in to create a domestic space.13 These can be as mundane as taking out the trash, doing the dishes, vacuuming the carpet. Or they might be as exciting as cooking a new meal for your mother or nephew or giving your lover a bath. Practicing home might mean rearranging a room to make it cozier. And it most certainly means nurturing the relationships that circulate in that domestic space. It would be impossible to make an exhaustive list of all of these practices, because they vary from family to family. (Moreover, prescribing and proscribing the practices that matter would create yet another way to make familia oppressive.) MICHAEL NAVA’S HENRY RIOS SERIES

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In Rag and Bone, the practice of home resonates sharply in the relationship between Henry and Angelito. Angelito is a wanderer in exile from home. With his mother, Vicky, he is on the run for his life. Given Pete’s murder and the physical abuse his cousin Butch had inflicted on Vicky, she and Angelito need a place of refuge, a place to call home, to protect them from Butch. Recall that Vicky knows Butch killed Pete for snitching on him. And, after beating and raping her, Butch threatens to kill Angelito if Vicky tells the police he killed Pete. Angelito’s feelings of exile are not unlike those of Henry, who fled a dysfunctional and abusive family and has been wandering as of late, trying to create a home. Mourning the death of his lover and suffering from failing health, Henry himself has been feeling estranged from home: ‘‘When I was a teenager, I’d suffered through growing pains; at forty-nine, I was suffering from growing-old pains’’ (2). In trying to comfort Angelito and better understand his own life, Henry draws an interesting connection between the present and ancient Greece, a connection that deploys the use of literature in constructing family and understanding the exilic condition. Watching a baseball game on television with Angelito, Henry wonders about ‘‘another myth of men’’ that had captured his attention and introduced him to the world of masculinity. His mind drifts from the game to the exploits captured in Homer’s epic poems. After excusing himself from the game, Henry returns with a book for Angelito, The Tales of Homer, a prose retelling of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Henry’s sharing of this book provides an interesting practice of home to examine. The adventures and struggles with exile Homer records, that is, act as an optic for observing the construction and potential comfort of family. In paging through the book, Henry is reminded of the first time he saw it some forty years earlier: ‘‘Reading about Achilles and Patroclus had, even in this bowdlerized version, intimated something about the love of men for one another that I scarcely understood but never forgot. Ulysses’ long journey, filled with suffering and adventure, had in some obscure but palpable way consoled and encouraged me as I struggled through my own difficult adolescence’’ (89). These passages reverberate nicely with Henry’s own childhood, in which he was subject to his father’s drunken violence and his mother’s retreat into religion, which left him and Elena ‘‘to fend for themselves’’ (9). From these tales, Henry also learned to accept his desire to love men, an acceptance he could not find at home. Though under dramatically different circumBROWN GUMSHOES

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stances, he, like Ulysses, was in exile. He was forced ‘‘to disappear, spending more and more time away from home, at school, at the houses of friends, at the city library, at the track field, anywhere [he] could find a refuge from [his] father’s rage and [his] mother’s sadness’’ (ibid.). The very sharing of these tales is a practice of home, in that Henry is trying to create a safe place in his house for Angelito. This is not to posit literature as some great humanizing force, but rather to understand the personal communion that transpires in the very sharing of objects between two human beings. Henry intends the tales to help Angelito cope with the turmoil around him, and this budding relationship discloses Henry’s desire to draw lines of connection that will construct a family for him. It is a queer family in the sense that it falls outside the traditionally conservative norms of domesticity and sexuality. Henry’s summary for Angelito of The Tales of Homer captures these sentiments of exile, home, and family: ‘‘The second story is about how one of the Greek soldiers named Ulysses tried for ten years to get home to his family and about the monsters he met and the adventures he had on the way’’ (89). Henry understands from his own experience that life is about meeting monsters and trying to get beyond them, fighting them off to carve out a space for oneself. Thus, Ulysses’s adventures mirror not only Angelito’s struggles but also Henry’s continued efforts to construct family and create home. These efforts can be especially confounding and alienating for homosexual youth as opposed to heterosexual youth, whose lives are mapped out for them and represented in television shows, movies, and magazines. In The Death of Friends, Henry recalls the troubles he had as a teen confronting these issues: ‘‘I watched my classmates being initiated into the world of men and women where everything was planned and the outcomes known: marriage, children, family. That world was unknown to me. I didn’t have a plan, didn’t know where I would end up’’ (59). There are, of course, plenty of disaffected and alienated heterosexual teens as well. But the coming-of-age process can be doubly alienating when one’s identity is criminalized and pathologized—one ends up not with maps and models to follow, but with feelings of inadequacy, alienation, and unworthiness tied directly to the core of one’s sexual identity. In addition to nurturing Angelito, this creation of home, of embracing and yet distancing oneself from family, complicates Henry’s own understanding of his exercise of will in a world shot through with power relations that allow no Archimedean standpoint from which to MICHAEL NAVA’S HENRY RIOS SERIES

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escape or evaluate them. In this push and pull, Henry oscillates between self-aggrandizing enunciations of complete agency and clearer understandings of the conditions under which he struggles and lives, conditions that he cannot escape at will. In an argument with John about Angelito and Vicky, for instance, Henry attempts to retreat to a position of autonomous will. He quips, ‘‘You know what, John, not everyone needs a family for a sense of identity. Some of us create ourselves’’ (97). While it may be true that we participate in a number of relations in understanding and constructing ourselves and that there are times when it might be valuable to escape one’s family, the arrogance with which Henry ends his retort rings hollow and borders on naïveté. In that short declarative, ‘‘Some of us create ourselves,’’ Henry sounds as if he thinks he can magically escape the very interlinked chains of relationships to become his own Prometheus. Rather, what a number of social theorists—Karl Marx and Michel Foucault, among others—recognize is that we are not autonomous agents who get to exercise complete free will. Our agency is always counterbalanced by conditions and contingencies not of our own choosing. When thinking with a clearer head, Henry recognizes the impact of these other forces in the practice of home and family. Invoking Ulysses again toward the end of Rag and Bone, Henry reflects, ‘‘I saw him [Angelito] now as Ulysses must have seen Telemachus at the end of his long voyage, the innocent son on the verge of his own journey, who might yet be taught how to avoid the dark places. I had never wanted a family, but Angelito has shown me what I wanted was irrelevant. I carried him in my veins; I couldn’t not love him’’ (262). As opposed to the bravado of willed self-creation with no restrictions, here is a Henry who has come to accept life’s contingencies and vicissitudes. Just as he cannot not love Angelito, he cannot not recognize that there are matters that fall beyond his reach in constructing the family he desires. It is important not to be too celebratory in our thinking about family. We must recognize its drawbacks as well as its benefits. Thinking through family means not only deconstructing the potential limits and oppressions of strictly defining family in concord with its heteronormative traditions, it also means being conscious and critical of the families that we might construct. In this vein, Nava teases out the complications of family through the characters of Vicky and John De León, the homophobic niece and the lover hesitant about his own homosexuality. If constructing a family that will affirm homosexual relations BROWN GUMSHOES

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means, in part, reimagining possible lines of connection, then Henry needs to work through his vexed relationship with Vicky. Aside from drawing a line of connection to Vicky for her own sake and worth, Henry must try to build this relationship because he both wants to maintain contact with his sister Elena and genuinely loves Vicky’s son Angelito. This bricoleur family requires a cobbling together of discrete relationships to foster a cohesive familial unit, otherwise unrecognizable as such. Vicky and Henry’s relationship shows us the complications of reimagining family in a homophobic world and the general struggles of maintaining family at all. The tensions between Henry and Vicky threaten to undermine the practices of home. A born-again, fundamentalist Christian, Vicky has found a source of solitude and strength in the church. At the same time, however, her religious beliefs fuel her intransigent hatred and fear of homosexuality. Her hatred threatens the very network of relations Henry and Elena attempt to establish.14 Henry’s love for Angelito and his respect for his sister militate against his rejection of Vicky. Elena tries to persuade Henry that Vicky keeps returning to them because she is looking for an alternative support structure: Elena asserts, ‘‘We have to offer her a substitute for what she’ll lose if she gives up her church.’’ Henry asks, ‘‘What alternative?’’ Elena retorts, ‘‘A family, Henry’’ (83). This exchange is particularly telling in that it reveals Nava’s larger project of investigating how one makes familial connections. The possible alternatives that Elena might suggest are numerous, yet she focuses on the family. Again, this illustrates the need to keep the traditional conception of family under erasure and to reimagine new lines of connection, for the family that Elena, Joanne, and Henry can offer Vicky distinguishes itself from the ‘‘traditional’’ nuclear family. If they are to reconstruct a new family, however, Henry must not simply tolerate Vicky’s hostility in order to help her. If he does, he jeopardizes his own respect and self-worth by reproducing the hateful family structure too many homosexuals must grow up with and live under. As Nava’s character Richie, whose family subjects him to electroshock torture to ‘‘cure’’ him of his homosexuality (Burning Plain 69), observes, ‘‘Your family fucks you up seven ways to Sunday, but it’s all right because they love you’’ (10). In order not to reproduce this hostile family structure, Henry must unsettle Vicky’s ignorance. After mildly correcting Angelito for calling him a joto (faggot), Henry gets to the source of the problem and challenges Vicky’s homophobia. First, he debunks her hateful stereotype that homosexuality entails MICHAEL NAVA’S HENRY RIOS SERIES

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preying on young boys and assures her that he will not hurt Angelito— an assurance he should not be forced to make, but must in order to check and educate Vicky.15 Then he offers the following pointed critique of her teaching Angelito derisive terms for homosexuals: ‘‘And I won’t hear the word joto in my house again. Or maricón or any other gutter words you’ve taught him to use about people like me and your mother. Remember something, Vicky, our blood flows through your veins. Whatever we are, you and Angel carry inside of you’’ (86). I don’t read Henry’s comments here as a biological determinist argument about race or sexuality so much as an appeal to the genetic bonds of family.16 His retort is an explicit reminder that they all share a common history and family, and that Vicky must come to terms with that if she expects to make personal connections with them. I especially appreciate that Nava does not allow this exchange to turn into an easy argument of persuasion. Vicky does not, that is, go through some dramatic conversion in which she suddenly sees the error of her ways and becomes starry-eyed over her newfound love for Henry and the family they might build together. Rather, Nava leaves Vicky stewing after the exchange as she vacuums the house ‘‘furiously for the next hour’’ (86). Resolving the crisis between Vicky and Henry too easily would vitiate the force of the novel’s meditation on family. As willing as many mystery readers are to suspend their disbelief, there is a point beyond which the writer cannot venture, and an immediate 180-degree turn in Vicky’s attitude would be such a point. If we are to learn anything about familia from this narrative, Nava cannot afford to render it in fantastic form. The hostility between Henry and Vicky does slowly dissipate through the course of the novel. Ultimately, Henry comes to embrace Vicky, and she comes to ‘‘throw her lot in with the Rioses’’ (288). Henry sums up their nascent relationship nicely when he maintains that he might be ‘‘beginning to master the paradox of family—loving without liking’’ (152). This paradox underscores the complexities of the practice of home and reimagining family. The developing relationship between John and Henry highlights the choices made in expressing one’s homosexuality and the obstacles that expression can create for forming unions. Not long ago, John left his wife for a man, but he remains uneasy with his bisexuality and attempts to keep his homosexuality hidden. Despite the fact that Henry loves the way John puts Angelito at ease, Henry thinks twice about reimagining familia with John because he is vexed by John’s closeting of his homosexuality. Representing their relationship in this way BROWN GUMSHOES

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demonstrates the struggles with which homosexuals must wrestle, struggles that heterosexuals living in a heteronormative world can take for granted, such as the very fashioning of one’s sexuality. In the exchanges between Henry and John about sexuality, we witness the many ways in which the poverty of relations and the failure of imagination about sexuality in the Mexicana/o and Chicana/o community condition Henry and John’s processes of self-identification. In confronting his own preconceptions about gay men, John reminds Henry of the stringent structures of masculinity in the Mexicano community:17 ‘‘Look, Henry, you’re mexicano, too, so you know the drill. Men are men. The only homosexual Mexican I ever met when I was a kid was one of my grown-up cousins who lived with his mom and wore more makeup than her. That’s what I thought all homosexuals were like. I was attracted to men. Until I met Tom [his former lover], I didn’t know someone could be both.’’ He grinned. ‘‘Tom helped me get over that machismo complex. He taught me there are all kinds of men, and some of them like to wear dresses sometimes’’ (70). The notion that there are prescribed, monolithic constructions of homosexuality exacerbates the poverty of relations. For if it is impossible to be comfortable with one’s own sexuality, then the attempt to imagine the lines of personal connection one might draw to others is stymied. When homosexuality is as pathologized and stigmatized as it is in the United States, it is understandable how men like John fall into the trap of missing the fluid constructions of homosexuality and mistake them for a monolith. Henry has a similar hang-up around bisexuality, and it threatens the relationship he might be able to foster with John. Henry’s dis-ease with John’s bisexuality is not a discomfort with bisexuality per se. Rather, he resents what he reads as John’s donning of a heterosexual cloak when it is convenient for him. After explaining his bisexuality to Henry, John asks if they can ‘‘get something going.’’ Henry replies, ‘‘Not if being bisexual means you screw guys on the side but if anyone asks, you have a girlfriend’’ (71). Henry rejects hiding one’s sexuality, though he knows from his own experience the life-threatening dangers of being out. Indeed, it is perhaps because he recognizes these dangers that he resents John’s closeting. Maybe Henry imagines that if more homosexuals were out, they could change the dominant perceptions that stigmatize homosexuality. We must remember, however, that while Henry has been explicit about his sexuality throughout the Henry Rios series, he never took part in the political actions of his lover Josh, who MICHAEL NAVA’S HENRY RIOS SERIES

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participated in activist groups such as Act Up and Queer Nation. Indeed, Henry’s lack of overt political activism and Josh’s HIV-positive diagnosis drove a wedge between them. As Henry reflects, ‘‘Each time Josh’s T-cell count dropped, I felt him drift further away from me, into his circle of Act Up friends, and his seropositive support group. Josh had become an AIDS guerrilla, impatient with my caution’’ (The Hidden Law 14). There are a variety of political stances to take vis-à-vis one’s sexuality. Henry is practicing one, John another, and Josh yet another. None of these positions can be the definitive statement on how one should live one’s homosexuality. Moreover, in a society that presumes heterosexuality, coming out can be a never-ending process as one continues to meet new people. John is simply more cautious and pragmatic than Henry, with whom he is out, as when he says to Henry, ‘‘You were right. I wouldn’t kiss you in front of my crew, they’d lose all respect for me. They’re like your niece, Henry. They come from a different place and there’s times you gotta go along with that’’ (95). John justifies his position by explaining that while he may not always be out, he does not tolerate homophobia among his workers: ‘‘We do work for gay guys all the time, and when we do, I tell my crew if I hear any fag jokes or any kind of remarks like that, they’re gone’’ (95). How to live one’s sexuality is a varied experience that should be respected as such. Because of this variety and the varying political responses to it, personal connections can be hard to foster. John and Henry index these difficulties and lead us to think, along with Nava, about what it means to practice familia. In writing about his former marriage to Bill Weinberger, Nava captures the significance of homosexual relations and families: So what about families? At some point most of us will choose one, the one we make with another person. A gay marriage is marriage stripped to the essential elements: love, commitment, shared values, common hopes. When it works, for however long it works, the family we create sustains us in a way that, too often, our natal families do not; we learn to love and be loved. There were many things I didn’t get from my marriage to Bill, but I got the miracle of love, the only miracle that most of us can hope for in this life. (‘‘First Person’’)

Though historically the heterosexual nuclear family has been represented and held up as the norm, there is no one way to construct familia or practice home. Moreover, given the potentially powerful relationships that can be forged through familial relations imagined

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otherwise, I think it premature to render familia intractably oppressive and to abandon it as useless. Whether or not we imagine them otherwise, families will persist, and they will continue to be used as the building blocks of community and nation. Thus it strikes me as politically naïve and dangerous to concede this valuable ground. Michelle Owen underscores this point in her discussion of same-sex marriages and notions of family in Canada. She argues that ‘‘the debate [about family] needs to be opened up so that it becomes possible for queers to both embrace and deconstruct ‘family’’’ (96).We must get beyond the poverty of relations that exemplifies a failure of imagination in articulating the possible personal connections we can make with others. As we keep the complicated signifier familia under erasure, we must think carefully about making existing families more tolerant of various sexualities and about how we can imagine new configurations of families. The difference between scratching familia and making familia from scratch is one of degree, not kind. Making familia from scratch presupposes that a recipe exists whereby we can know the ingredients of familia in advance, and in starting over with this recipe familia can be made anew. Scratching familia (keeping it under erasure) contends that there can be no recipe to follow. We must imagine new lines of connection and trouble our own understandings of what we take family to be, never blindly accepting preconceived notions of what familia is. The repression of sexuality comes not only from outside the Chicana/o community but inside it as well. Thus, we must be vigilant about the communities we construct and their potential to be oppressive. Familia cannot continue to be invoked, neither metaphorically nor literally, as a space free of power relations, a space that magically holds the Chicana/o community together. Familia is fraught with its own history of oppression and exclusion; we must proceed with caution when invoking it. In this regard, I concur with Yvonne YarbroBejarano, who reminds us of the inherent dangers of Chicana/o nationalism and its familial exclusions: ‘‘This internal repression often occurs in narratives of the family, in which our self-imaginings are cast in patriarchal and heterosexist moulds that restrict the possible gamut of roles for women and men. Our task for what remains of the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, then, is to retain the contestatory critique of U.S. state domination, while exercising increased vigilance over the ways our own narratives can dominate and exclude’’ (336).

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Thinking along with Michael Nava about race, sexuality, family, love, and relations goes a long way toward fulfilling the tall orders Yarbro-Bejarano lays out in her manifesto for the practices of Chicana/o studies. Nava helps us reimagine the multiple ways in which we might construct and reconstruct familia. He offers alternatives to the prescribed understanding of what it means to be a man in the Chicana/o community—new understandings that do not stigmatize homosexuality. In addition, he refuses to offer pat solutions for practicing home and constructing family, as is clear in the complicated lines of articulation he draws among Elena, Henry, John, Vicky, and Angelito. Michael Nava’s candid exploration of homosexuality is a welcome and muchneeded addition to Chicana/o letters. May we as critics, readers, activists, and family members exude such richness in imagining familia and transcending the extant poverty of relations. From this rearticulation of family, I move to Lucha Corpi as she wrestles with her ambivalence with the successes and failures of the Chicana/o Movement. Written on the heels of the 1980s feminist revival in detective fiction, Corpi’s Gloria Damasco series launches its own feminist critique of a unified, singular Chicano subject, a critique that she at times is reluctant to make.

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chapter 3

LUCHA CORPI’S GLORIA DAMASCO SERIES DETECTING CULTURAL MEMORY AND CHICANIDAD

In her Gloria Damasco series, Lucha Corpi investigates the various historical shifts and constructions of Chicanidad since the Chicana/o Movement (roughly 1965–1975) even more systematically than her Chicano counterparts writing in the detective genre. Comprising Eulogy for a Brown Angel (1992), Cactus Blood (1995), and Black Widow’s Wardrobe (1999), Corpi’s series seeks to better understand how history and memory shape identity and to gauge their corresponding impact on political movements. With each novel, Corpi, a feminist writer steeped in the Chicana/o activism of the 1960s and 1970s, struggles more and more with the often monolithic construction of Chicana/o cultural identity associated with the Chicana/o Movement. She moves toward a more fluid and complex understanding of identity better suited to address the political, cultural, and social exigencies of the contemporary moment. In the Damasco series, Corpi, a one-time student of the Movement, arrives at what Norma Alarcón has identified as ‘‘the realization that there is no fixed identity’’ (‘‘Chicana Feminism’’ 250). In recognizing this fluidity, Corpi grows increasingly ambivalent about Chicana/o cultural identity, because as she tries to construct a historically causal chain with which to understand this identity formation, she finds herself bumping up against the discontinuities of the past and present, as well as her own nostalgia for the Movement. Ultimately, however, she finds a space from which to articulate and better understand the provisionality and strategic dimensions of cultural identity. The hard-boiled tradition in which Corpi writes maintains two competing impulses that complement her inquiry into the construction of Chicana/o identity. On the one hand, hard-boiled narratives emplot a cold, causal linearity so as to build a chain of evidence to solve

the crime(s). On the other hand, the hard-boiled detective’s calculating rationality runs smack up against a nostalgia for a time of radical innocence. The nostalgia of the Damasco series shares a common impetus with the feminist detective fiction of the 1980s by writers such as Sara Paretsky, Marcia Muller, and Sue Grafton. As Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones note, ‘‘The female private eye genre as it evolved in the 1980s was [. . .] fueled by a nostalgia for the idealistic social action of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the women’s movement (and activism more generally) seemed to hold so much promise for changing both society as a whole and individual lives’’ (34).1 The hard-boiled detective oscillates, then, between passionless rationality and nostalgic affect. Working within these conventions, Corpi endeavors to establish a causal chain to account for the historical development of the Chicana/o subject. At every turn, however, this linear causality must confront the contingent and discontinuous flows of history. Similarly, the historical memories Corpi revisits in the Damasco series frustrate her nostalgia for an imagined, radically innocent past. Consequently, these ways of knowing the past bear directly on the constructions of identity. It is both against and with these competing impulses of rationality and nostalgia that Corpi seeks to make sense of the last thirty or so years of Chicana/o history and cultural identity. The articulations of history, memory, and cultural identity so crucial to Eulogy, Cactus, and Black Widow surfaced in Corpi’s first novel Delia’s Song (1989), a story based loosely on Corpi’s own involvement in the Chicana/o Movement. As Delia Treviño, the novel’s principal character, works through the entanglements of her love life and her budding career as a writer, Corpi takes us back to Delia’s days as a student activist at Berkeley in the late 1960s. In these analeptic flashes, Corpi scrutinizes the building of Chicana/o community around the struggles of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), a student movement that sought to establish a ‘‘Third World College’’ at Berkeley to teach Asian American, Chicano, African American, and Native American studies. Delia’s role as chronicler of the Movement prepares the reader for Corpi’s later fictional creation, Gloria Damasco. Nowhere is this more clear than in Delia’s late-1970s meeting with one of her former professors. Moving aimlessly through life, Delia is taken by her professor’s suggestion that she become a writer: ‘‘Writing would help her restore proper order to a world that had collapsed around her’’ (78). Restoring order to a collapsing world is precisely what Corpi undertakes in the Gloria Damasco series. BROWN GUMSHOES

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The construction of this first fictional character as a keeper of student memories weds Corpi to a critical inquiry into history and identity, a project to which she becomes even more inextricably linked when she takes up the detective genre. In his reading of Paul Auster’s City of Glass, Jeffrey Nealon argues that there is a special quality of infinitude to the writing of detective novels, for in them the writer and the detective ‘‘embark on a journey that has no guaranteed destination’’ (‘‘Work of the Detective’’ 118). Nealon presents the writing of detective novels as a project without guarantees, a project from which the writer, unlike the reader, cannot walk away: ‘‘For the reader, the mystery always ends, regardless of whether it is solved. Even if the detective is thwarted or killed, the book eventually does come to a conclusion [. . .]. No such luxury, however, is available to the writer or the detective. Once they enter the space of the mystery, there is no guarantee of an ordered conclusion—no guarantee even of the closure afforded the reader by the final period placed after the final sentence’’ (ibid.). Nealon’s analysis of City of Glass marks how the detective and the writer are mutually engaged in an investigation for which there may be no endpoint, and I would argue that in that reciprocal engagement it can often be difficult to draw sharp distinctions between protagonist and writer. A cursory reading of the overlapping identities of Paul Auster, Daniel Quinn, William Wilson, and Max Work—the author of and principal characters in City of Glass—highlights this ontological and textual embedding. Consequently, the reader may notice that in working through Corpi’s assessment of Chicana/o subjectivity, I too find myself caught up in the many ways Lucha Corpi the author and Gloria Damasco the fictional detective become intertwined in their inquiry into Chicana/o identity. This is by no means to suggest that autobiographical fiction represents the ultimate or only attainable horizon for Chicana/o writers. Rather, I want to highlight, following Nealon’s lead, the multiple ways in which the writer and her protagonist walk down interlinking paths on their potentially endless journey. On this trip, Corpi attempts to make sense of the permutations of Chicana/o subjectivity since the Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In doing so, she shuttles the reader back and forth between the present and key moments in Chicana/o history, allowing her to reflect on the relation between past and present, history and identity. Rather than erroneously bracketing cultural identity into neat synchronic moments, Corpi offers a diachronic construction of identity that must move through the flows and discontinuities of the past and present, LUCHA CORPI’S GLORIA DAMASCO SERIES

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the present and past. She offers us a picture of the Chicana/o subject in formation. In her understanding of the provisionality of Chicana/o identity, Corpi exemplifies what in a different context Andrew Pepper describes as the response of ethnic detectives to the overly determined black/white color line in the United States: ‘‘Indeed, one can perhaps understand why crime novels written by, and about, individuals from, say, Jamaica or Cuba (who do not easily fit into categories like black or white, at least not in the traditional sense), offer a more complex, flexible, and satisfactory model for identity construction, one that acknowledges both the extent of existing racial divisions and the inability of the old language of race relations to cope with the fragmented nature of black and white identities in the United States’’ (‘‘Bridges and Boundaries’’ 252). Pepper’s comments can be appropriately extended to Chicana/os, who, like Cubans and Jamaicans, do not fit easily within the U.S. black/ white racial binary.2 This restrictive binary provides a crucial context for understanding Corpi’s investigation of Chicana/o identity, culture, and history, for it was partially in resistance to this oppressive racial coding that Mexican Americans of the 1960s and 1970s sought to forge a self-empowering Chicana/o identity. Whereas Corpi illustrates a dynamic forging and understanding of a Chicana/o subject shaped in history, Chicana/o cultural workers have far too frequently tried to access a mythic memory to shape a Chicana/o identity. Typically this mythic memory derived from three sources—a pre-Columbian or pre-Cortesian America, the Mexican Revolution, and/or the Chicana/o Movement. Chicana/o writers drew on these mythic memories to fashion an empowering identity to combat racist hostilities. Rafael Pérez-Torres argues that ‘‘Chicana/o poets once valorized a mythic memory to which they feigned an all too easy access, and in that valorization, they construct[ed] a cultural identity blind and mute to the important distinctions between and among the different cultural communities supposedly served by the invocation of that memory’’ (‘‘Feathering the Serpent’’ 300). In more recent years, this staid understanding and unproblematic deployment of mythic memory has evolved into a more subtle understanding of the fluidity and resistive dimensions of cultural identity (314). Eulogy, Cactus, and Black Widow participate in this more fluid construction of identity and history. Published only three years after Delia’s Song, Eulogy demonstrates the strongest ties to an older cultural nationalist identity. These nationBROWN GUMSHOES

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alist sympathies first surface in the novel’s epigraph, an excerpt from the corrido (ballad) ‘‘Garbanzo Beret,’’ by José Montoya, one of the principal poets and leading figures of the Movement: Down Whittier, La Raza marched To protest against the government. Fists raised, in one voice they all chanted: Power to the Chicano!

The power-to-the-people rhetoric situates this epigraph in that strong tradition of epic poems associated with the Chicana/o Movement. Moreover, the corrido form locates us within a long history of formal opposition and the heroic struggle of Mexicana/o heroes who fought off Anglo oppressors. The best-known of these heroes is, of course, Gregorio Cortez.3 Thus the rhetoric and the form of the epigraph set up reader expectations associated with the nationalist struggles of the Chicana/o Movement. It would seem that Corpi is still working through the political project she began in Delia’s Song. In Eulogy, however, Corpi is both attracted to and repelled by the politics of the Movement. Since Corpi’s work remains relatively unknown, let me begin with a brief description of the novel. It opens with Gloria Damasco’s discovery of a three-year-old boy’s corpse at the Chicano Moratorium, a 1970 rally to protest the disproportionate deaths of Chicanos in Vietnam. As she helps investigate the death of the young boy (Michael David Cisneros), Gloria, a speech therapist by training, suddenly finds herself transformed into an amateur detective. In the midst of her investigation, her sole informant (Mando) is murdered. Within a year, Gloria collapses from anemia and exhaustion. At her husband’s request, she ceases her investigation, but eighteen years later when her husband dies, Gloria is back on the case, this time with the assistance of a professional detective, Justin Escobar, and her best friend, Luisa Cortez. While the novel begins with the Chicano Moratorium, the investigation carries Gloria away from that historical moment and into a family drama where the seeds of Michael David’s murder lie. Ultimately, Gloria’s psychic visions help her solve the murder, though she remains suspicious of these visions throughout the novel, demonstrating her acceptance of the sexist binary that privileges reason over intuition.4 By novel’s end, a bullet intended for Gloria claims her best friend Luisa’s life. On August 29, 1970, some 30,000 people gathered for the Chicano LUCHA CORPI’S GLORIA DAMASCO SERIES

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Moratorium in East Los Angeles’s Laguna Park. They had come together to protest the war in Vietnam and the toll it was exacting on Chicanos. Prior to the rally, public officials and police administrators created a hostile environment when they referred to the demonstrators as ‘‘militants’’ and declared that ‘‘they were going to teach them a lesson’’ (Gómez-Quiñones 126). Early in the afternoon some youths had allegedly shoplifted at a liquor store about a block away from the protest. Rodolfo Acuña notes that rather than ‘‘isolating this incident, [the police] rushed squad cars to the park, and armed officers prepared to enter the park area’’ (347). Subsequently, like many initially peaceful protests of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Kent State), the Moratorium witnessed unnecessary bloodshed as the police employed excessive force to disperse the crowd. Armed with tear gas and nightsticks, the police unleashed their wrath on the demonstrators, resulting in dire outcomes for both sides: ‘‘Forty officers were injured and twenty-five police cars put out of action, while three people were killed and four hundred arrested. That same night, four policeman were shot in the Chicano area of the Casablanca district of Riverside’’ (Gómez-Quiñones 127). Though numerous people were either injured or killed, two consequences of that day stand out. First, Rubén Salazar, a prominent Chicano reporter for the Los Angeles Times, was killed. The peculiar circumstances of his death conjoined with his status as a Chicano reporter for the mainstream press aroused suspicion. Some even called his death a planned assault. When he was fatally struck in the head by a tear-gas canister, Salazar was not involved in the protest; he was eating lunch at the Silver Dollar Café. That Salazar had used his Los Angeles Times column to denounce discrimination against Chicana/os and Mexicana/os made his death look all the more calculated. Second, the police singled out another Chicano intellectual, Rodolfo ‘‘Corky’’ Gonzales. Gonzales, the founder of Crusade for Justice, a Denver-based Chicana/o civil rights organization, had been invited as a guest speaker to the Moratorium. The police arrested him on spurious charges as a suspect in Salazar’s death. The use of the Moratorium as a framing device and the division of the novel into two temporally distinct parts (Part I is set in 1970; Part II in 1988) establish an interesting conjunction for examining the relationship between history, memory, and identity. It is important for Corpi to record the events of the Chicano Moratorium because they are so frequently left out of the dominant canons of history, but it is the temporal disjunction between the two halves of the novel that makes BROWN GUMSHOES

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the inclusion of the Moratorium a compelling narrative move. By situating the novel’s second half in 1988, that is, Corpi creates the necessary temporal distance to gauge the shaping force of the Moratorium in particular and the Movement in general. Gloria’s reflections upon returning to East L.A. in 1988, for instance, show her navigating the historical disjunction between the past and the present. She wants to impose a linear historical construction on the development of Chicana/o history and identity: ‘‘Not having been to East L.A. since the Moratorium march in 1970, I decided to drive through the old barrio. As expected it has changed in some ways. In other instances, it seems as if things have stood still. Except for the fact that the Silver Dollar Café is now only a bar, and a plaque with Rubén Salazar’s name is displayed somewhere around Laguna Park, there is little to remind people of the events that at the time we thought would shape our political future in California’’ (130). In tension here is a desire to locate a concrete moment in history against the discontinuity and ephemerality of time and memory. The calculated linear trajectory Gloria may wish to impose on past events never unfolds that neatly or linearly. Thus the names and landmarks that many Chicana/os, like Gloria, believed would have a shaping force on the future have been reduced to lifeless plaques and changed venues, just so much flotsam and jetsam in a sea of memories. That Gloria says Salazar’s plaque is ‘‘somewhere around Laguna Park’’ underscores time’s capacity to efface the past. Rubén Salazar, once a central voice in Chicana/o struggles, no longer marks a specific moment in history or even in the everyday geography of Laguna Park. His efforts, like his presence, exist in some unspecified space. Salazar’s displacement reminds us of the creative (not necessarily progressive) impulses of memory. It ‘‘revises, reorders, refigures, resignifies; it includes or omits, embellishes or represses, decorates or drops,’’ writes Gayle Greene, ‘‘according to imperatives of its own.’’ Memory is a ‘‘shaper and shape shifter that takes liberties with the past as artful and lying as any taken by the creative writer’’ (294). Throughout the Damasco series, Gloria’s memories challenge traditional understandings of U.S. history and shape-shift into her own construction of Chicana/o identity and community. Her memory reminds us once again that the historical project bears no definitive arche and/or telos. The beginning and end reside with the enunciator of memory. ‘‘We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities,’’ observes Michel FouLUCHA CORPI’S GLORIA DAMASCO SERIES

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cault, but ‘‘the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference’’ (‘‘Nietzsche’’ 155). It is precisely among these lost events that Damasco detects, all the while searching for points of reference upon which to build a narrative about the development of Chicana/o history and identity. Much as Gloria compiles evidence into a causal chain to solve her case, Corpi moves us in her novels from one historic event to the next to build a causal chain capable of accounting for contemporary Chicana/o identity. From Delia’s Song to Black Widow’s Wardrobe, she covers the following historical terrain: the Third World Liberation Front student strike (1968), the Chicano Moratorium (1970), the grape workers’ strike in Delano, California (1973), and the vexed relationship between the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés and his indigenous translator, Malinche. Corpi’s project suggests, then, that these are key events for understanding Chicana/o culture and life. Her attempt to construct a causally determined chain from these events characterizes the very epistemology of the detective genre. Like her own detective, Corpi displays a faith in causality over coincidence: ‘‘Unless we thwarted fate’s efforts with our willfulness, she [Gloria’s grandmother] often told me, meeting with certain people was predestined, the course of major events in our lives already charted. [. . .] coincidences ceased to be a series of random events when an intelligence made sense of them. I had always wanted to be that intelligence’’ (Cactus 23–24). Corpi, too, seeks to be that guiding intelligence, as she couples the epistemology of the detective novel with her construction and representation of the Chicana/o community. The Damasco series also demonstrates Corpi’s apparent faith in historical memory as a means to counter state violence. In addition to serving as a source of news, history becomes what Patrick Smith, in a different context, has called ‘‘a kind of subversion, a weapon in the ongoing war between rememberers and forgetters’’ (37). Consider, for instance, Gloria’s descriptions in Eulogy of Whittier Boulevard shortly after the Moratorium and then again two days later: ‘‘The cleaning crews were already at work. Piles of clothing were strewn, still saturated with the smell of tear gas and blood. Picnic gear, containers full of food and drinks were everywhere. We even saw a stroller and a baby rattle. Luisa and I looked straight ahead as if that way we could keep our hearts from racing, our minds from remembering’’ (40). In this description, the vestiges of the march are visible and legible, BROWN GUMSHOES

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despite Gloria and Luisa’s willed amnesia. Corpi juxtaposes the violence of the police invasion (tear gas and blood) with the peaceful, family-like nature of the protest (picnic gear, a stroller, and a baby rattle). Even from this brief catalog of remnants, one can readily decipher the nature of the conflict. Two days afterward, Gloria notes, the scene had changed: ‘‘Cruising down the boulevard on that last morning of August, one could hardly believe that only two days before, violence had prevailed. Except for a few boarded-up store windows, everything seemed back to normal. For the first time, I realized how enduring the human spirit is, but couldn’t help wondering if at times this very quality prevented us from eradicating injustice more quickly’’ (71). The city’s ability to return Whittier Boulevard to a ‘‘normal’’ state attests less to the human spirit’s power than to the city officials’ expertise in effacing the traces of their own crime. In the name of state control, the police perpetrated a crime that few willingly remember. Corpi’s choice to frame her novel with the Chicano Moratorium evokes and preserves a historical memory that some would also like to be returned to its ‘‘normal’’ state, a state of victory and noble heroes, not of crimes against humanity. As Tim Libretti correctly observes of Eulogy, Gloria’s detection indicts not just the individual who murdered Michael David Cisneros, but also highlights ‘‘the larger crimes against people of color through the mechanisms of colonialism and internal colonialism’’ (64). This ability to sanitize the scenes of social unrest and physical violence advances historical amnesia in a war of ‘‘rememberers’’ versus ‘‘forgetters.’’ And as Gloria notes, this amnesia prevents the eradication of injustice. If crimes appear not to have happened and if their historical traces can be erased, then who could reasonably wish to eradicate that which does not exist. By logical extension, if the crimes are not visible, if they cannot be read on the landscape, they must not have occurred. Eulogy represents both Corpi’s faith in the power of the historical record and her commitment to the Movement. She enlists a causal narrative about the Chicano Moratorium and the Chicana/o Movement to blast open, to jostle into consciousness, the amnesiac historical chronology whose absences and erasures threaten Chicana/o cultural identity. Corpi’s own ambivalence about the cultural politics of the Movement becomes clearer in Cactus Blood. There are hints of this ambivalence in Eulogy, as when Gloria avers that ‘‘Chicano nationalism and feminism didn’t walk hand in hand before or during the summer of LUCHA CORPI’S GLORIA DAMASCO SERIES

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1970’’ (66), but it is in Cactus Blood that we first witness Gloria’s growing pains. In Cactus, Gloria becomes self-reflexively critical of the Chicana/o community. She questions for the first time her nostalgic ideas about the radical innocence of the Movement. Indeed, it is in Cactus that we first see Corpi connect the Movement with the term ‘‘nostalgia.’’ In Eulogy she points out the stifling nature of the Movement’s consensus politics, but she never goes quite so far as to question her memories as nostalgic, a key step on the road to ambivalence. Since we are somewhat removed from the Delano grape pickers’ strike of 1973, the principal historical context for Cactus, I will briefly describe the key struggles and players from that battle. On September 8, 1965, Larry Itliong led his principally Filipino union of agricultural workers (Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, awoc) in a strike against grape growers in Delano, California. The strike was over higher pay and union recognition. Sensing he would need support in this endeavor, Itliong enlisted the assistance of César Chávez and the United Farm Workers (ufw). The strike lasted five years and brought about the now-famous boycott of non-union grapes (1968–1975). In 1970, the growers recognized the union and signed contracts with it, and the strike came to an end. In 1973, when the union contracts expired, however, the ufw was forced to strike again. The growers had refused to renew the ufw contracts and instead signed on with the Teamsters, who had little interest in the farm workers. Truckers were, and continue to be, the Teamsters’ principal concern; their interest in the strike was borne of a fear that their truckers would be out of work without produce to haul. The dispute was not resolved until 1975, when then Governor Jerry Brown forged a compromise between the ufw and the Teamsters. According to Brown’s solution (which later became the 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act), the Teamsters would be in charge of the cannery and packing-shed workers and the ufw would oversee the field workers (M. Gonzales 198–201). Shortly after Cactus opens, the Oakland police find Sonny Mares dead in his apartment. Leo Mares, a member of the Oakland Police Department and Sonny’s brother, hires Gloria Damasco and her partner Justin Escobar to investigate Sonny’s death. Corpi leads us to believe that Sonny’s murder is tied to his involvement in the 1973 Delano strike, when Sonny, Ramón Caballos, and Art Bello had planned to blow up all the pesticide tanks in Delano. Art and Sonny backed out at the last minute, but Ramón proceeded as planned. At the trial for

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the bombing, Ramón’s friends (Art, Sonny, Josie Baldomar, and Phillipe Hazlitt) testified against him. Shortly after Sonny’s death, Art disappears, and Corpi encourages us to conclude that Ramón is avenging himself. The narrative then introduces Carlota Navarro, who in 1973, at the age of 14, was sold from her home in Mexico to a Dr. Mark Stephens in California. After nearly a year with the doctor and his family, Carlota must flee to avoid Dr. Stephens’s sexual assault. During her escape, she inadvertently runs through orchards and vineyards drenched in pesticide. Exposure to the chemicals causes her irreparable neurological damage. The novel’s climax brings us to the Sonoma Valley, where the principal characters gather for a showdown. We learn that Sonny committed suicide, and Art fled town to protect himself. Josie, not Ramón, is the principal culprit behind most of the violence—she only sprung Ramón from jail to be her fall guy. She killed her husband Phillipe Hazlitt because he left her for Remmi Marie Hunter (neé Remmine Marie Stephens, daughter of Dr. Mark Stephens). She crucified Remmi to a cactus, though Remmi survives this ordeal. In this final confrontation, Josie is holding Carlota hostage because she fears Carlota is abandoning her to be with Ramón. The police, of course, apprehend Josie, but she commits suicide before she can be sent to prison. Ramón helps Carlota return to Mexico, and Gloria and Justin finally consummate their growing-ever-steamier relationship. The novel concludes with the 1989 earthquake that ravished the Bay Area. In the flux and flow between 1973 and 1989, Corpi begins to construct an ambivalent Gloria. If she spoke of the stifling politics of the Movement in Eulogy, in Cactus Gloria experiences her own dis-ease with the politics and identity construction of the Chicana/o Movement. This is evinced most clearly as she grapples with her nostalgia for what she perceives as the radical innocence of the Movement. Focusing on the traces of nostalgia in Cactus, this novel reads as a bildungsroman of sorts, a not-incidental feature given the growing ambivalence in the novel. A key characteristic of the bildungsroman is the hero’s loss of innocence, and it is such a loss that fuels Gloria’s nostalgia. After watching Art’s video about the 1973 grape strike, Gloria pines for the sixties and seventies. Since the video chronicles the political and physical violence exacted against Chicana/os, readers may rightly question why Gloria wishes to return to those days. A step ahead here, Corpi anticipates this objection: ‘‘Intellectually, I realized it was fool-

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ish to long for the most oppressive and repressive times we, as Chicanos, had experienced. But I had the feeling I didn’t miss the activism as much as the innocence that had underscored our political zeal and the newness of our commitment. I connected our harrowing experience—the violent repressive actions of the police against us at the 1970 National Chicano Moratorium march in East Los Angeles and during the 1973 United Farm Workers’ strike and grape boycott—with the loss of that innocence’’ (21). While this preemptory strike may effectively ward off readers’ initial objections, Corpi cannot sidestep the historical conundrum she sets up. Nostalgia will always block the way of effective political change because it vitiates the historical context it tries to locate. And if the credo of the Marxist critic is to ‘‘Always historicize!’’ (Jameson, Political Unconscious 9), then to render the past with nostalgia dissipates revolutionary change. Yet this agonistic relationship between memory and nostalgia, history and collective identity is precisely what Corpi works through in these novels. We are a long way now from the rather one-dimensional portrayal of the Movement in Delia’s Song. If, as Gayle Greene maintains, ‘‘textual feminists subvert ‘nostalgic rhetoric’ by mining the past to discover play rather than place’’ (305), then Gloria’s remembrances are not static but in flux. As Corpi moves Gloria back and forth between 1989 and 1973, the numerous constitutive flows of the past in the present and the present in the past become apparent. In these nostalgic moments, Gloria oscillates between a desire for a causal linearity and a recognition that history is discontinuous and contingent, ‘‘play rather than place.’’ In short, Corpi tries to work against static notions of history and to question any transparent access to mythic memories. The nostalgia Gloria suffers from, however, is not the most insidious form of nostalgia, i.e., a blind nostalgia. Rather, hers is a critically self-aware nostalgia. She realizes she is being nostalgic, as when she notes, ‘‘It was foolish to long for the most oppressive and repressive times we, as Chicanos, had experienced.’’ The worst nostalgia, by contrast, refuses to recognize its own blindness to the material conditions under which it lives.5 In yearning for a committed community of activists, Corpi’s nostalgia operates not out of blindness, but from fear of a dual erasure. First, the dominant historical record poses a threat because it has typically discounted marginalized communities’ histories, and second, Chicanas must also contend with the masculinist memories of the Movement’s struggles.6 In Corpi’s relation to and investigaBROWN GUMSHOES

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tion of the past, one hears echoes of Ruby B. Rich’s analysis of nostalgia in the emergent female detective novels of the 1980s: The new genre plays with a nostalgia for the 1960s and ’70s as it flagrantly owes its very revisionist existence to the 1980s. . . . It plays with the layers of our subjectivities, literalizing them into actual landscapes in which the trials and tribulations of the present turn out to have roots in the past’s unfinished business. This time-travel must account for some of the genre’s success: balm poured on our contemporary schizophrenia, it allows a recuperation of the past without giving in to either [Women’s] Movement nostalgia or regressive fault-finding. (qtd. in Walton and Jones 34; ellipsis in original)

As an index of Corpi’s evolving understanding of Chicana/o identity, the nostalgia in the text can also be articulated to the moment at which Corpi was composing her novel. She dedicates the novel to both her father and César Chávez (1927–1993). When Chávez died, a shock wave reverberated through the Chicana/o community, and there was a public grieving as a founding figure of la causa Chicana was marshaled to his grave. Published in 1995, Cactus was certainly being composed at the time of Chávez’s death. Coupled with a deluge of anti-immigrant and anti-minority legislation (e.g., California’s Proposition 187), his death must have overwhelmed activist writers like Corpi who had dedicated their lives to the struggle for social justice. These pressing circumstances shed light on the nostalgic tendencies in Cactus and help explain why, in the face of a discontinuous present, writers like Corpi seek to build a causally linear narrative about the development of the Chicana/o community, a linearity consistent with the epistemology of the detective novel. An older female character in the novel counsels Gloria: ‘‘To look into the past [. . .] is to look into the future. But it takes a certain kind of talent, a great gift, to see how the past will become the future’’ (94). From Delia’s Song to Black Widow’s Wardrobe, Corpi tries to do just that—see how the past will become the future. Or, better put, she writes the past into the future. Understanding that a collective memory mitigates the trauma of historical erasures and aids in the construction of a group identity, it becomes clear that Carlota’s fading memory in Cactus registers Gloria’s fear and ambivalence. In her capacity to represent the violence enacted on the farm workers’ bodies, Carlota becomes a metonym for the Chicana/o body politic. She is a frightening representative, because the neurological damage she suffered affects both her speech and her memory. Her failing voice speaks to the agency often denied marginalized LUCHA CORPI’S GLORIA DAMASCO SERIES

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communities, but it is her failing memory that truly haunts Gloria. The chemicals rotting her memory are not unlike the canons of history denying voice and identity to Chicana/os. Carlota laments to Gloria, ‘‘It’s as though a praying mantis were eating away at my memory. [. . .] I sometimes go to sleep repeating my name again and again. I’m afraid I’ll wake up and not know who I am’’ (146). Similarly, a fear of forgetting underwrites Gloria’s own nostalgia for the Movement, the heyday of Chicana/o activism, but at the same time her historical memories also make her ambivalent about the Movement. These were times not only of overt political oppression but also of stultifying monolithic politics and imagined homogenous identities. Speaking of his own ‘‘movement [away] from the ‘movement,’’’ José Limón, one of the most prominent and astute critics of Mexican American culture, notes, ‘‘The movement’s nationalism led us to imagine both the dominant society and our culture in monolithic and mythic terms, a worldview from which many have still not yet recovered’’ (American Encounters 133). In Dickensian fashion, one could say that the Movement represents the best of times and the worst of times. Corpi, not unlike Limón, finds herself, as a former sixties activist and a still-committed intellectual, wrestling with a growing ambivalence about what Chicana/o identity was and is. She has stepped onto that writing path, where the writer and the detective ‘‘embark on a journey that has no guaranteed destination’’ (Nealon, ‘‘Work of the Detective’’ 118)—an especially frightening prospect for a writer who once seemed confident in the dimensions and direction of Chicana/o subjectivity. The earthquake that draws Cactus to a close is the clearest manifestation of ambivalence in the novel. Throughout Cactus, Corpi images nature as a historical palimpsest. Thus, for instance, she uses her characters’ trip to the Sonoma Valley to recall nineteenth-century battles of conquest, like the Bear Flag Revolt. To move from nature as historical marker to nature as catastrophe has certain metaphorical implications. The earthquake moves us away from the tidy conclusion of the classical detective novel, where the world is typically presented as ultimately knowable and therefore containable, toward a world without guarantees, a world of ambivalence.7 Although the criminals are brought to justice at the end of Cactus, what transpires at the novel’s conclusion signifies dissolution rather than resolution. If nature serves as a palimpsest recording historical events, then we must read an earthquake as a disruption, a tearing, a BROWN GUMSHOES

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shattering of the historical record. An earthquake sends shock waves through the ground that fracture the earth’s spatial order and, simultaneously, its social relations. The 1989 Bay Area earthquake registered 6.9 on the Richter scale, resulting in a number of deaths, the collapse of major highways, the postponement of the World Series, and, for our immediate interest, a disruption of the temporary order Gloria and Justin had imposed on their case. The earthquake’s symbolic fragmentation of the social realm has less to do with the novel’s criminal case than with Corpi’s own growing ambivalence. The nearly apocalyptic ending limns a community replete with chaos, shattered lives, and downed lines of communication and transportation. Corpi’s description reaches nearly eschatological proportions: ‘‘The double-deck of the Cypress structure in Oakland is now a pile of rubble and twisted steel. It looks as though a giant played hopscotch on it and crushed it’’ (248). ‘‘As if to remind us that it wasn’t over,’’ Gloria narrates, ‘‘another strong aftershock shook us again. [. . .] My heart began to beat faster as I thought that the [radio] transmission had been cut off’’ (249). In a genre predicated on epistemological inquiry, Corpi concludes with an earthquake that temporarily precludes the very means of knowing. Codes one cannot access cannot be deciphered. This knowledge crisis underscores the crisis facing the Chicana/o community, namely, as Corpi sees it, the dissolution of the Chicana/o body politic in the late twentieth century. In the closing paragraph of the novel, Corpi makes an interestingly sentimental narrative move. She attempts to rectify the identity crisis she has constructed and to unify what Cherríe Moraga has referred to as the ‘‘Chicano tribe’’ by shifting away from a rhetoric of crisis toward a rhetoric of natural healing. As if to recover from the ideological demise the earthquake represents, Corpi pivots to the other extreme, to regenerative qualities in nature. In the maudlin tones of the final paragraph, Gloria vows, ‘‘‘Tomorrow, or when this is over, I will plant the tiny nopal at the foot of Luisa’s grave,’ I promised aloud, looking up at the morning star punctuating the canvas of the night’’ (249). Corpi wants to bring us back to the realm in which nature serves as a beneficent marker of memory, both to her dead and ailing friends and to the Chicana/o community as metonymically represented by the cactus. With the crimes solved, Corpi endeavors to rectify the novel’s ontological crisis, which she has depicted as the withering of Chicana/o solidarity. It is as if she is trying to work against the very ambivalence she finds herself confronting throughout the novel. Yet this narrative gesture LUCHA CORPI’S GLORIA DAMASCO SERIES

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cannot contain that ambivalence, and it peaks in the most recent installment in the Damasco Series, Black Widow’s Wardrobe. Unlike the other two Damasco novels, Black Widow turns not to a lived moment from the Chicana/o Movement, but takes a much grander historical leap backward, to the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Here Corpi wishes to engage the symbolic and cultural residue that the now-notorious meeting between Hernán Cortés and La Malinche (aka Marina and Malintzin Tenepal, 1502?–1527?) has left on contemporary Chicana/o life.8 Historical sources are scarce and often contradictory regarding Marina’s relationship with Cortés and her role in the conquest of Mexico. An indigenous woman who spoke Nahuatl, Marina was given as a gift to the Spaniards. Her ability to speak the Aztecs’ language was crucial to Cortés because his official interpreter, Geronimo de Aguilar, spoke only the Mayan language. Sold earlier as a slave to the Mayas, Marina spoke their language as well; thus a triangulated conversation between Aguilar, Cortés, and Marina was possible. Soon after being given to Cortés, Marina learns Spanish, making her even more attractive to the Spanish colonizer. This much is clear: Marina served as an intermediary between Cortés and the Indian populations. She also bore Cortés’s children. Thus Mexicans, considered to have been born from this union, sometimes derisively refer to themselves as hijos de la chingada (children of the violated one). The point of contention arises around Marina’s agency: was she a willing agent in the conquest of Mexico? Or was she a woman with limited agency exercising what will she could to protect herself and other Indians? Marina’s dominant image in the twentieth century has been that of a traitor, a vendida. She has been so closely tied to this traitor complex that in Spanish one can refer to a ‘‘sell-out’’ not only as a vendida but also as a malinche or a malinchista. Indeed, some try to dismiss the valuable work of Chicana feminists by labeling them malinches. Rather than consider the complex dynamics and asymmetrical power relations in Cortés and Marina’s relationship, historians and cultural critics have typically cast aspersions on Marina and held her accountable for the conquest. In the late 1970s and 1980s a number of Mexican and Chicana feminists sought to rectify this bias by building a more complex understanding of the conquest and of Marina.9 Corpi’s Black Widow participates in this inquiry. Dealing with both historical representations and her own construction of Marina causes Corpi’s ambivalence about Chicana/o cultural identity to reach a sustained pitch in this novel. BROWN GUMSHOES

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Black Widow’s Wardrobe opens at a Day of the Dead procession in 1990, where Gloria witnesses a murder attempt on a woman’s life.10 The woman turns out to be Licia Román Lecuona (aka the Black Widow), who in 1972 murdered her husband, Peter, because he was physically and mentally abusive. In a pro forma hearing, Licia was sentenced to twenty years in prison, but she was paroled after eighteen years. Concerned about Licia’s well-being, Michael Cisneros hires Gloria and Justin to keep an eye on her. As Gloria trails Licia, we learn that Licia believes that she is the contemporary reincarnation of Marina. Further, she sees her reincarnation as tied to the principle of Karma, which relates past lives to present selves. Corpi’s playing out of this connection between past lives and present selves strikes a harmonious chord for the interesting intersections among history, memory, and identity. Much as in Eulogy, a family crisis underlies the Black Widow mystery. Just prior to murdering Peter, Licia had become pregnant. Peter wanted her to have an abortion, but she refused. While in prison she gives birth to twins, whom her father-in-law, Martín Lecuona, abducts. Peter’s sister, Isabela, and her husband, Juan Gabriel Legoretta, adopt the twins. Licia knows nothing about the adoption; she was told that the twins (Martín and Inés) were stillborn. When she discovers that they are alive, she desperately wants them back. Juan and Isabela flee to Mexico with the twins because Juan is involved in drug smuggling and stealing pre-Columbian artifacts from Mexico. Determined to reunite with her children, Licia pursues them. Setting the chase scene in Mexico allows Corpi to delve further into the history of Cortés and Marina. The chase terminates with the death of Juan and Martín and the demise of the drug-smuggling ring. Licia returns to the United States and sets up a trust fund for Inés and Isabela, and she leaves Gloria a letter saying that she is going back to her birthplace where she was born five hundred years ago. She signs the letter ‘‘Malintzin Tenepal.’’ A week later news arrives that a pile of women’s clothes were found in the chapel where Malintzin used to pray. Like Cactus, the novel concludes with a natural disaster, but this time the Oakland hills are consumed in fire, fires that burn Licia’s house to the ground. A neighbor maintains she saw Licia go into the house and presumably start the fire. The fire department, however, finds no evidence of human remains or arson. Corpi concludes the novel on that curiously eerie note. Even this cursory description lays out the complex of issues at the heart of Corpi’s growing ambivalence about a monolithic Chicana/o LUCHA CORPI’S GLORIA DAMASCO SERIES

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identity. She wrestles with a history of asymmetrical gender relations and considers how past lives inform present selves, both individual and collective. As she works through these issues, especially the novel’s feminist concerns, Corpi tackles the discontinuities of the past and present to better understand the complex, contemporary inflections of identity formation. With Black Widow, Corpi has arrived at an awareness of what Coco Fusco identifies as ‘‘the impossibility of reducing cultural identity to a simplistic paradigm’’ (33). Corpi clearly recognizes that cultural identity cannot be harnessed to an overdetermined essence presupposed to reside in the Chicana/o body politic. She must, however, work through this idea not by returning to the Movement (as in Eulogy and Cactus), but by excavating the history of a much older symbolic figure, La Malinche. Corpi exhibits no nostalgia in this novel for the radical innocence of her activist heyday. Rather, a historiographic struggle over the conquest of Mexico and its articulation to gendered identities presides over the novel. As the history of Marina makes clear, no ‘‘simplistic paradigms’’ for cultural identity obtain, and it is this recognition that makes Corpi’s ambivalence about Chicana/o cultural identity resolutely clear. Corpi’s strategy of reincarnating a character as Marina offers the perfect vehicle to consider the articulations among history, memory, and identity, for it prevents the reader from ossifying the past into a moment without contemporary resonance. For instance, in reviewing her notes on reincarnation, Gloria comes across the following passage: ‘‘Karma is cause and effect, red and green. Also called the Law of Retribution, its causes and effects can be traced back to the actions of previous selves in past lives. When we gain knowledge of who we have been and what we have done, change can be effected in our present life’’ (51). This logic by which Licia lives resonates with the larger cultural politics of the Damasco series. Corpi, that is, has been working her way through these detective novels as a means to imagine and understand the various connections between past and present, memory and identity. Developing the history of Marina not only sheds light on Licia’s character, but foregrounding the residual symbolic effects Marina has had on the lives of contemporary Chicanas also provides a means to better comprehend the dimensions of Chicana/o identity. Additionally, pursuing the Marina theme brings the historiographic process to the fore. Gloria must enlist the services of her mother and her mother’s comadre (friend) to learn about Marina, because Gloria BROWN GUMSHOES

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believes Licia is to die like Marina did. It is difficult to suspend our disbelief that a Chicana like Gloria (i.e., an activist from the Movement still committed to political causes) would know precious little about Marina, but it is compelling to do so, for her ignorance underscores the importance of struggling over the historical record. If an ‘‘insider’’ like Gloria is unaware of Marina’s history, how can others be expected to know it? In piecing together Marina’s life, Corpi makes Gloria explicitly aware of the contingencies that riddle history: ‘‘Reconstructing Malinche’s life accurately had to be quite a difficult task, if not impossible. All the available information on her, complimentary or not, had been provided by men, from Bernal Díaz and other witnesses during the conquest, to López Gómara, Hernán Cortés’s biographer. Many had quite an historic ax to grind with Malinche’’ (97). Corpi moves from the paucity and prejudice of historical sources to a paragraph on the significance of reclaiming Marina: ‘‘I surmised that Chicana scholars and writers aimed at creating a new and more positive view of La Malinche. In doing so, they hoped to give Mexicanas and Chicanas a better sense of themselves, not as las hijas de la chingada— the Indian woman violated and subjugated by the conqueror—but as las hijas de la Malinche—the daughters of an intelligent woman who had exercised the options available to her and chose her own destiny’’ (ibid.). These passages address at least two impulses in the novel and in the series. On the one hand, Corpi argues à la Hayden White that history is narrative, and that the teller of the story determines the emplotment of the historical narrative. If Corpi wants to argue that because men recorded Malinche’s history, it must of necessity be flawed or wrong, then I would hesitate to agree with her. By that logic the only histories we could trust would be ones that demonstrated a one-to-one correspondence between the historian and the subject matter. That type of authenticity politics stultifies intellectual engagement and stymies social change. If, as the end of the first passage indicates, Corpi means that ideological positions bias history (‘‘many had an historic ax to grind’’), then I am more comfortable with that assertion. It is both more intellectually satisfying and more consistent with the knowledge and identity concerns of the Damasco series. We should always ask on whose behalf history is written and what ends it serves. These questions correspond nicely with the second passage cited above, on the feminist reclamation of Marina. Corpi points out the ruptures in history that have shaped Marina’s image—they are LUCHA CORPI’S GLORIA DAMASCO SERIES

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ruptures because the very historical accidents and ideological beliefs that have turned Malinche into a vendida could have just as easily been remembered as the motives for reclaiming Marina as an agent of history, rather than a mere object. She may have been operating under constraints not of her own choosing, but she did, as Corpi points out, exercise a degree of agency in ‘‘choosing her own destiny.’’ That destiny, though, has been subject to the ideological manipulations of the dominant historical record, which has remembered her not as ‘‘an intelligent woman,’’ but as a traitor.11 Marina, then, helps us understand the growing ambivalence in the Damasco series because she marks not only the acts of erasure in the dominant historical record, but also the masculinist ideological project of the Chicano Movement. Thus Gloria’s growing feminist consciousness finds her at a crossroads with Chicano nationalism and the Movement’s patriarchal rhetoric. We are a long way from Eulogy and its Movement-era epigraph, reveling in its power-to-the-people rhetoric. In Black Widow, Corpi distances Gloria from the Movement, which allows her to question its goals and precepts. Only in understanding the complexity of history and its relation to identity can Gloria display reservations over Marina herself. When Luisa asks Gloria what she believes to be the truth about Malinche, Gloria responds, ‘‘I don’t know. I can only tell you what others have said about her. Without her own written testimony, I can only second-guess her reasons for fighting beside Cortés against the Aztecs. I can only speculate on the speculation of others. Not much truth left in that’’ (120). Her philosophical rejoinder about history and identity signals an even stronger ambivalence than that registered at the end of Cactus. Ambivalence reaches its apex in Black Widow, illustrating Corpi’s awareness that in the contemporary moment—one characterized by a globalizing economy and an ever-present heterogeneous Chicana/o community—a supposedly monolithic, homogenous Chicana/o community cannot exist. Further, the Chicana/o community was never as homogenous or monolithic as it presented itself to be in the 1960s and 1970s. It was always a fiction, always an imagined community. This is not to denigrate the positive social changes the Movement effected, but to recognize that those who called themselves Chicano had to efface a number of cultural and ethnic differences to imagine themselves as a united front. In all three novels—Eulogy for a Brown Angel, Cactus Blood, and Black Widow’s Wardrobe—Corpi conjoins the detective novel’s quintBROWN GUMSHOES

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essential epistemological adventures with inquiries into lo Chicano, that which captures and encapsulates an essential Chicana/o identity. While her social critiques at times engage an old cultural nationalist rhetoric, she typically strikes a productively agonistic relation to homogenizing, monolithic forms of cultural identity. The Damasco series represents the reflections of a Movement-era activist (i.e., Lucha Corpi) coming to terms with her own attachments and ambivalence to Chicana/o identity. Her memories of the Movement, like the historical frames and figures in her novels, are narratives she has woven together to make sense of the past and present. They share the desire of the detective novel for a linear causality, but Corpi finds that linear order disrupted time and again in her series. Consequently, Corpi’s ambivalence marks a rupture with any notion of a totalizing, mythic memory that would unproblematically take recourse to the past to construct a homogenous Chicana/o identity. Her refusal to colligate heterogeneous groups under a seemingly unified signifier, Chicano, distinguishes her work from the homogenizing moves of much Movement-era writing. Consider, for instance, Angie Chabram-Dernesesian’s remarks that in Rodolfo ‘‘Corky’’ Gonzales’s ‘‘Yo soy Joaquín/I am Joaquín’’ (perhaps the epic poem of the Chicano Movement), the speaking subject infers that groups as culturally and racially distinct as Mexicanos, Españoles, Latinos, Hispanos, and Chicanos, not to mention Yaquis, Tarahumaras, Chamulas, Zapotecs, Mestizos, and Indios ‘‘are all the same because of his authenticating universal discourse of the Chicano’’ (272; emphasis in original). By contrast, Corpi constructs a cultural identity that recognizes its discontinuities and ruptures, its dynamic status as always in formation and oscillating among the interstitial spaces between past and present. The complexity with which Corpi draws on the flows of memory to elucidate the intricacies of cultural identities emblematizes the nuances of the emergent Chicana and Chicano cultural aesthetic. This aesthetic’s strategies of ‘‘negotiation’’ rather than ‘‘negation’’ signal its dialogical, rather than dialectic, exchanges. During the Movement’s heyday far too many appealed to a stultifying dialectic that ossified ‘‘us’’ versus ‘‘them,’’ both categories seemingly given a priori. In addition, the transcendence (Aufhebung) that would resolve this dialectical tension would purportedly arrive via the formation of a Chicana/o nation state, namely Aztlán. That nascent nationalism rummaged about for its originary moment in a pre-Cortesian mythic memory. The Chicano thesis would construct a unified cultural identity and negate its LUCHA CORPI’S GLORIA DAMASCO SERIES

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contradictory Anglo antithesis through the appropriation and historical flattening-out of an indigenous past at odds with the lived experiences and hybrid identities of the Chicana/os it sought to valorize and unify. Corpi’s detective novels swim against this nationalist current. In speaking of the dialogic exchanges around cultural identity in Corpi’s writing, I privilege the term ‘‘negotiation’’ over ‘‘negation.’’ I take my cue here from Homi Bhabha, who writes, ‘‘When I talk of negotiation rather than negation, it is to convey a temporality that makes it possible to conceive of the articulation of antagonistic or contradictory elements: a dialectic without the emergence of a teleological or transcendent History, and beyond the prescriptive form of symptomatic reading where the nervous tics on the surface of ideology reveal the ‘real materialist contradiction’ that History embodies’’ (25). The agonistic relation Corpi strikes in constructing a Chicana cultural memory seeks not to negate its contradiction in search of a supposedly higher-order synthesis, but to negotiate its cultural ambivalence with its dialogic interlocutors. Notwithstanding the maudlin overtones at the end of Cactus, for instance, Corpi demonstrates that she is not trying to resolve the contradictions of a heretofore presumably unified Chicana/o identity with a contemporary, discontinuous Chicana/o subject. Rather, the earthquake limns the very ruptures flowing through both the geography and the human space of a Chicana/o cultural identity. In not rushing to resolve these dialogic tensions, Corpi demonstrates that ‘‘history is happening’’ (ibid.). It is not a static force waiting to be discovered. No, as the Damasco series makes clear, we draw on and exploit memory to invent our pasts and presents and forge our cultural identities. The emergence of a new Chicana/o cultural aesthetic, such as that represented in Corpi’s detective novels, moves into what Bhabha has called a ‘‘Third Space of enunciation.’’ The intervention of this space ‘‘makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys the mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open code.’’ ‘‘Such an intervention,’’ he continues, ‘‘quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People’’ (37). Bhabha’s equation productively resonates with my argument about Chicana/o cultural identity, namely that the memory upon which that identity relies cannot seek a determinate originary moment but must continuously swim in the flows of past and present, present BROWN GUMSHOES

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and past. By challenging staid notions of history as the loci of an originary past, the complexities of cultural identities and how they connect to our political projects can be better understood. Although the new cultural aesthetic requires recognition of the constructions and complexities of identity, it does not preclude the forging, at times, of a political identity in the service of a unified project. Rather, it asks that we note the limits and powers of the cultural identities we construct. Corpi’s detective novels enunciate a new Chicana subject into the discontinuous and fragmented terrain of history, past and present. Just as Gloria wrestles with her own growing ambivalence over the Movement and the construction of monolithic identities in the service of political change, Manuel Ramos constructs a male character who shares much of Gloria’s dis-ease with the past and its relation to the present. Ramos’s hero, Luis Montez, however, adds another facet to this inquiry, for he is concerned with the construction and performance of Chicano masculinity.

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chapter 4

MANUEL RAMOS’S LUIS MONTEZ SERIES ¿QUIÉN SOY YO? CRISES OF IDENTITY AND CULTURE

Notwithstanding the havoc metaphysical detective fiction has wreaked on the tidy world of pat resolutions, readers have grown comfortable with the traditional way the detective formula unfolds. The experienced reader of detective novels may not be able to identify the criminal before novel’s end, but s/he knows the general outline of the formula and the expected plot patterns. Given that readers know these patterns in advance, language, setting, and character development carry an especially heavy burden. The success of a detective series depends on readers getting attached to the hero and wanting to learn more about him or her. Manuel Ramos’s Luis Montez mysteries may be intriguing, but what pulls the reader into the narrative is neither the criminal acts nor their resolution. For many Mexican American readers, the hook is the existential crisis Ramos runs Montez through, a crisis predicated on constructions of masculinity, invisibility, and fear of erasure.1 Like Lucha Corpi, Manuel Ramos uses his detective series to investigate the interworkings of history and identity. A contemporary of Corpi’s, Ramos too finds himself wrestling with the relationship between the nationalist subject of the Chicana/o Movement and the contemporary, post-nationalist Chicana/o subject. The discourses Montez contends with cover terrain not explored in Corpi, Nava, or Hinojosa. Ramos offers a new branch on which to perch and examine the forging of Chicana/o identity in the contemporary moment. Initiated in 1993, the Montez series consists of The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz (1993), The Ballad of Gato Guerrero (1994), The Last Client of Luis Montez (1996), and Blues for the Buffalo (1997).2 In each novel, Montez must struggle with the shaping discourses

of masculinity, nationalism, race, and work. Analyzing this discursive problematic gives us a purchase on the complexities of Chicana/o identity and how that identity shifts over time. Montez represents an aging cohort of those Chicana/os whose identities relied on the Chicana/o Movement for security, but who now find themselves living in a postnationalist world, where the structuring discourses of the Movement no longer hold. Critics have yet to fully investigate the complexity of these shifting narratives of identity, and until this is done we will be left with an incomplete understanding of the contemporary Chicana/o subject. This incompleteness hamstrings efforts to analyze Chicana/o cultural production and social relations. Through Luis’s existential crisis we can understand better how Chicana/os perform their complex postnationalist identities. From the start of the series, Ramos introduces Luis as a character in search of his identity. An aging Chicano nationalist with a history embedded in the Chicana/o Movement, Luis is so baffled by the meaning of life that he reasons that a man he just sent to prison ‘‘[a]t least knew what he would be doing, and where he would be doing it [. . .] I didn’t have a clue’’ (Rocky Ruiz 3). As opposed to the security of a routinized life in prison, Luis is ‘‘fed up with [his] scraggly-assed existence as a borderline lawyer’’ (ibid.).3 Luis’s search signals a crisis of culture and identity. I would sketch the general pattern of Luis’s existential crisis as follows. First, living in a post-nationalist moment, Luis must figure out what it means to perform one’s masculinity, a masculinity complicated by the very hard-boiled genre in which Ramos writes.4 Second, Luis must grapple with his nationalist inclinations and the nostalgia they produce. Third, over the last several decades, the discourses of race and racism have grown ever subtler, and Luis lacks the once-secure, if contrived, nationalist rhetoric to make sense of these racial predicaments. Finally, the shaping discourse of work further embroils Luis in a struggle to figure out who he is. His work as a lawyer should provide him with the cultural capital to shore up his self-worth, yet for Luis the profession is utterly bankrupt. These foundational features of his crisis sharpen from text to text and often imbricate themselves within each other. The more cases Luis pursues as an amateur detective, the more introspective he becomes and the more he learns about himself. While Luis’s struggles cannot fully encompass the experience of all Chicana/os, the general themes Ramos tackles address the current debate over Chicana/o identity. I begin with a discussion of masculinity MANUEL RAMOS’S LUIS MONTEZ SERIES

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in the series as a whole to establish an important context for the analysis of Luis’s identity crisis. THE DESIRE TO BE A M-A-N

In Chicana/o studies, scholars have too often avoided, stereotyped, or given only cursory attention to masculinity, yet it is a critical element in defining identity and understanding social relations. Though gender studies have developed a more comprehensive analysis of the general performance of manhood, still lacking is a sophisticated understanding of Chicano masculinity. In Muy Macho: Latino Men Confront Their Manhood (1996), Ray González assembled a group of Latino writers to initiate a conversation on Latino masculinity. Interesting as this conversation was, unfortunately it has not been followed up with the verve one might have hoped for. I take up this discussion through the Montez series to analyze further how masculinity informs Chicano identity. As Luis vies with his manhood, the reader apprehends how contemporary Chicano masculinity is structured and how it produces effects. The Montez series compels us to consider the rigidity and flexibility of the scripts for Chicano masculinity. Luis is not merely an unmediated extension of the men from the Movement. To play on Oscar Zeta Acosta’s emblematic model of Movement masculinity, Luis is a brown buffalo with a difference. In addition to the racial and nationalist scripts through which Luis must negotiate his manhood are the generic ones into which Ramos has written his hero. The very masculinist genre of the hard-boiled detective story complements Ramos’s foray into the performance of manhood. The historical distance from his wise-cracking, tough-guy precursors—Sam Spade, Mike Hammer, and the Continental Op—produces a space from which Ramos can look awry at the genre, and, with a nod and a wink, structure a character self-conscious about his masculinity. The damsel is not in distress, nor does she need saving. As the Montez series shows, Ramos recognizes that ‘‘it is no longer possible simply to declare one’s manhood as a form of identity politics. Masculinity [. . .] is a vexed term variously inflected, multiply defined, not limited to straightforward descriptions of maleness’’ (Berger, Wallis, and Watson 2). Ramos cannot, nor does he, take Luis’s masculinity for granted. I propose that Ramos searches for a new space from which to write a hard-boiled, formerly nationalist detective into the shifting discourses BROWN GUMSHOES

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on gender relations.While it was once expected that hard-boiled writers would model their private eyes after Chandler’s and Hammett’s, the feminist detective fiction of the 1980s (e.g., Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, and Sue Grafton) unsettled those expectations. Similarly, a Chicana/o writer working in the 1990s cannot simply take recourse to the cultural codes of the 1960s and 1970s without some historical explanation for how and why s/he does so. Hence, we see Luis pivot back and forth between the present and the past in his identification, creating a series of complex and contradictory exchanges. Ramos is not searching for easy solutions to Luis’s manhood; he is demonstrating the complexity and ambivalence with which that identity is lived. Ramos does not transform his one-time nationalist and hypermasculine protagonist into a new man overnight or even over the few years covered in the series. He gives us a character trying to distance himself from a macho sensibility, yet one full of enough human foibles that he at times falls back into his cock-of-the-walk style. Because Luis is unsure of how to navigate the newer discourses of masculinity, he sometimes resorts to the older ones. These two modes of masculinity clash when, in the initial pages of the series-opening novel The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz, Luis is introduced to his friend Tino’s new lover, Teresa Fuentes. In the same breath that he acknowledges that his ‘‘years of chasing every manner and style of woman’’ have torn apart his marriages and broken hearts, he falls right back into the chase: ‘‘[Teresa’s] eyes turned me into a twenty-one-year-old loco, a dude on the prowl, and the world again was inhabited by beautiful, sensual women. The most beautiful, the most sensual was right there in front of me, rubbing her thigh against macho Tino, to be sure, but now she had met me, and, if Tino was pendejo enough to steer her my way, well, ese, así es la vida [dude, such is life], man’’ (5–6). Rather than dismiss these lines as derivative drivel learned from the hard-boiled school, it is more productive to note that they illustrate the competing tendencies with which Luis works through his masculinity. He attempts to see himself as not macho while simultaneously living through a fantasy that objectifies Teresa. He defines himself explicitly against Tino’s machismo—‘‘macho Tino.’’ Yet in the closing lines, he also imagines himself more of a ladies’ man than Tino. He believes he can ‘‘steal’’ Teresa away from him. Luis’s masculinity plays itself out, then, not only in his physical description of Teresa, but also in imagining her as an inanimate prize to be won or lost, lacking any agency of her own. He is caught in a trap of competing discourses on masculinity. MANUEL RAMOS’S LUIS MONTEZ SERIES

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In seeing his old buddy Tino, Luis, who may perhaps want to renegotiate his manhood, falls back into the machismo of the Movement. This old-school masculine style stems in part from racist attacks against men of color during the 1950s and 1960s. Much like their African American counterparts in the civil rights movement, Chicanos wanted their manhood recognized and respected. These men of color wanted to be M-E-N—not a dog, not a nigger, not a spic, not a wetback, but a M-A-N. While this performance of masculinity was a strategic response to racism, it came packaged with its own bit of sexism, a sexism that plays itself out as Tino and Luis contend for Teresa’s affection. As Luis works through his masculinity with Tino, Ramos demonstrates how this overly determined social script is both porous and historically specific. These aging veteranos try to re-create their past through the physical gestures that once symbolized their manhood and carnalismo (brotherhood): ‘‘Our hands met in a halfhearted attempt at the Chicano handshake, but we didn’t quite remember all the intricacies’’ (4). They fail to remember the intricacies of the Chicano power shake because over the years the socio-symbolic resonance of that shake has begun to fade. Their clumsiness with this ritual reveals the historical nature of the structuring discourses of masculinity. The power shake, the once-requisite greeting of two Chicano males, lacks the fluency with which it used to be performed. Read against the scene in which Luis lusts for Teresa, this poorly executed attempt at brotherhood shows that Luis’s masculinity is in flux. He is drawing on antiquated ideas of masculinity at the same time that he learns new ones. Ramos uses this contrapuntal technique to work through the intricacies of Chicano and hard-boiled masculinity. To understand Luis and to have a better general knowledge of Chicano masculinity, we must consider how work connects to the performance of masculinity. Ramos illustrates this joint performance in the relationship he establishes between Luis and his female colleague, Janice Kendall, aka ‘‘The Shark.’’ The courtroom represents an overtly competitive space in which lawyers seek to be king of the hill, lord of the jungle—pick your masculine metaphor. Janice, however, is capable of transcending those masculine boundaries to win cases for her clients. That Luis must ask her to defend him in his disciplinary hearing for striking another lawyer complicates his sense of masculinity. Having to come hat-in-hand to Janice compromises any sense of a singular, unreconstructed masculinity that Ramos has attempted to establish thus far for Luis. In order to garner Janice’s assistance, Luis BROWN GUMSHOES

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must transgress the macho precept that men fight their own battles. Placing Luis in this situation asks readers to evaluate his mixed feelings of respect, sexism, and fear toward Janice. For instance, just when Ramos sets Luis up as respectful of Janice’s professional accomplishments, such as her past presidency of the Women’s Bar Association, Luis then adds that it doesn’t hurt his business ‘‘to have a little professional respect hanging around [. . .] in a skirt and a pair of high heels’’ (Rocky Ruiz 15). It is as if he must shore up his wounded masculine ego by objectifying Janice as a skirt and high heels. Indeed, Greg Forter argues that the attendant misogyny in hard-boiled fiction is an attempt by the male hero to ‘‘vanquish a feminine principle that threatens his ‘sense of a discrete self’’’ (11). Combined with Montez’s sexism, however, is also a respect of Janice’s courtroom talents, but unfortunately, the language Luis uses to praise Janice takes on stereotypically masculine imagery. She is a shark who ‘‘feasts on the remains of her adversaries’’; automobile-like, her trial presentations are ‘‘sleek and streamlined’’; and like either a prize fighter or a coercive thug, she leaves judges and juries ‘‘no choice but to give her the decision’’ (16). Ramos, however, does not abandon Luis to this stereotypical description of Janice. After thoroughly masculinizing her, Luis checks his characterization with the wryly understated declarative: ‘‘Janice was also one of the nicest people I knew’’ (16). After a lengthy description of Janice’s killer instincts, Luis nearly winks at the reader when he describes her kindness. A cutthroat personality and a kind one are typically thought to be mutually exclusive. Simultaneously, the sentence attempts to undermine Luis’s macho sensibility. While nowhere else in the series does Ramos present such a brutal image of successful male lawyers, he recognizes that he has presented a rather ‘‘castrating’’ image of Janice. Feminists have instructed us well on the contradictory tendency to consider assertive men powerful and assertive women ‘‘bitches.’’ There is something, however, more interesting than a binarized critique of patriarchy in Luis’s portrayal of Janice. Ramos examines the very construction and performance of gendered identities and how these identities overlap and reinforce one another. He questions the gendering of personalities and work traits. Moreover, having Janice as Luis’s defense attorney casts a woman in the role of hero rather than femme fatale, a twist on some of the older hard-boiled novels. Janice is no damsel in distress, and Luis is no superhero.5 We move from the courtroom to the family to examine masculinity’s other structuring discourses. With this shift, we enter the initial site MANUEL RAMOS’S LUIS MONTEZ SERIES

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of gender structuring—the family dynamic. The first introduction to the performance of masculinity comes from the males in the home. Rudolfo Anaya, who has called Luis Montez ‘‘introspective and sensitive’’ and ‘‘a macho in the best sense,’’ 6 avers that ‘‘macho means taking care of la familia. Perhaps this is the most important definition of macho, the real, positive meaning of the word’’ (‘‘I’m the King’’ 66). The dynamic Ramos establishes between Luis and his siblings and his ailing father reveals the shaping discourse of family. As Luis’s brothers and sisters gather to discuss the failing health of the family patriarch (Jesús), the familial dynamic that shapes Luis’s role as a man comes to the fore. Family circumscribes and conditions the practices of Luis’s manhood. His older brother, Chuey, resents Luis because he feels the family funded Luis’s education at the expense of the other family members. At the same time, however, he expects Luis to take care of the family because of his advanced education. Chuey declares, ‘‘You’re the one we should be able to go to with our problems, with questions, so we can get advice, help. But you’re never around, Louie, or you’re too busy [. . .]’’ (Last Client 83). On one hand, Chuey wants Luis to perform as the ersatz family patriarch, but on the other, his upbraiding of Luis undermines the authority he ascribes to him. Interestingly, this clash between Luis and Chuey fails to escalate into a masculine showdown, not because the two brothers practice self-restraint, but because the two sisters (Roberta and Graciela) intervene: ‘‘I [Luis] acted as though I was about to set the record straight, but Roberta and Graciela frowned at me and I shut up’’ (83). Exercising their own quiet authority, the two women shape the performance of Luis’s manhood.While Luis’s legal credentials and education grant him authority in the courtroom, they are not guarantees of domestic or familial know-how, and his sisters, unlike Chuey, recognize this. Thus, the showdown scene between Luis and Chuey undermines Anaya’s notion of the macho (coded exclusively as male) as taking responsibility for the well-being of the family. All the members of the family, not just the men, would be considered macho because the sisters, too, care for la familia, enough to keep the men from fighting when the focus should be on the father’s failing health. I am not arguing with what Anaya characterizes as the ‘‘noble’’ and ‘‘honorable’’ roles of the macho. My contention is that for him they are a priori assumptions, and I want to question this ahistorical, predetermined notion of manhood. Performances of manhood are not, as Anaya asserts in his essay ‘‘‘I’m the King’: The Macho Image,’’ ‘‘largely BROWN GUMSHOES

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unchanged across time’’ (59). They are provisional, porous, and strategic. To his credit, Anaya recognizes the need to reinterpret the stereotypes of masculinity and gender roles. In the closing paragraph of the essay, for instance, he searches for a new way to configure La Llorona, the weeping woman of great fame and notoriety in the Mexicana/o and Chicana/o communities: ‘‘Blame men, the pillars of morality of the community, if she has been given a bad rap. Blame ourselves if we do not reinterpret the old myths and give them new meaning for our violent time. There’s hope in new interpretations, a hope that will bring new understanding to our roles as men and women. We don’t have to be stuck with old stereotypic roles of behavior that define dysfunctional machos’’ (71). Barring his assertion that men are ‘‘the pillars of morality’’ and that they should be the ones who shoulder these reinterpretations (perhaps his own bit of macho self-indulgence as he takes the chivalric and noble role to set things right), Anaya waxes socially progressive here, no easy feat for a man from an older generation for whom these macho roles were/are sacrosanct. Speaking of older generations and their conceptions of manhood, Luis’s father provides a useful foil for the prevailing idea of Chicano manhood. His relationship with Luis further unmasks attributes of our detective’s masculinity.While Jesús by no means plays Watson to Luis’s Holmes, Luis frequently turns to him for advice. Jesús is the ubiquitous Chicano father we hear so much about in Chicana/o literature and life, and his differing model of masculinity shapes the manhood Luis performs. Ramos’s introduction of Jesús in the series resonates with the (stereo)typical image of the father as the distant icon who provides for the family, yet remains an enigma. For instance, Luis describes Jesús not in a personal way, but in terms of his work, longevity, and role as the family patriarch: ‘‘Jesús Genaro Montez, migrant worker, coal miner, construction laborer, father of four sons and three daughters, admired and respected by his friends and neighbors, feared by his children. He outlived my mother and I knew he would stand laughing over my coffin when I cashed in’’ (Rocky Ruiz 24). The complete absence of the mother in the series emphasizes the father’s centrality as the macho. He is the structuring male and parental presence through which Luis comes to know himself. Beneath the veneer of the mystery story, then, resides the story of a man and his father, a story of the performance of masculinity. The masculinity narrative attempts to work through the dis-ease MANUEL RAMOS’S LUIS MONTEZ SERIES

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heterosexual men, even fathers and sons, often feel in being too close. Indeed, Jesús’s introduction in the series is accompanied by a stretch of conversational banter that discloses the distance between the two men. Checking in on his dad, Luis says, ‘‘I tried to sound like a concerned son. ‘You been eating? You want some lunch? We can eat if you want’’’ (ibid.). The language suggests that Luis must make an effort to figure out what his lines in this play are supposed to be. They do not come easily. His father’s response fulfills the scripted role of the cranky older male, who has no time for mundane small talk: ‘‘He waved his wrinkled, gray-haired wrist at me in a gesture of disgust at my vile suggestion. ‘¿Comida? Todavia, hambre, hambre. Why don’t you eat before you go out, Louie? I can’t go gallivanting all around town with you to your taco and burrito joints’ ’’ (24–25). This pugnacious repartee continues for another page. None of these lines could possibly be construed as genuine dialogue, fruitful exchange. They represent how the discourse of machismo limits male interaction. Luis and Jesús cannot be real with one another because they, like so many Chicanos, are hyperconscious of the ‘‘proper’’ roles for being men. These relations are allowed to become more intimate when the older male is cast as the wise elder. In these older male/younger male relations, the ephebe attempts to live up to the master’s standards. Since there is no mother present in the Montez series, Luis, the ephebe, does not suffer from an Oedipal complex. Rather, he craves his father’s acceptance and respect. Yet Jesús smirks at rather than shines on Luis’s life. In Rocky Ruiz, we learn that Jesús did not take Luis’s activism in college seriously. Luis notes that Jesús has been ‘‘entertained by [him] for as long as [he] could remember’’ (57). Having one’s life pursuits construed as entertaining hardly generates feelings of respect and admiration. Indeed, Luis feels that even his father has not accepted him as a M-A-N. Luis’s inability to live up to Jesús’s expectations entangles him in a conundrum about his masculinity, which diverges sharply from his dad’s toughness. Moreover, the sting from Jesús’s earlier scoffs at Luis’s college activism has not dissipated with Luis’s maturation into a professional capable of performing his duties as a macho. Jesús no more accepts Luis’s career as a lawyer than he did his college politics: ‘‘My becoming a lawyer embarrassed him. Lawyers were people to avoid. One spoke to an abogado only if one had such big trouble that there was no other way. If you failed, you saw a lawyer. And a lawyer made money off of people’s misery. It was that simple. [. . .] [I]t was too bad BROWN GUMSHOES

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his youngest son couldn’t manage to do something honorable with his life. A carpenter or farmer, for example’’ (57–58). Work is a key component of identity. For a man trying to demonstrate his worth to his father, the importance of job choice is amplified. Everything about Luis’s job, however, contrasts with Jesús’s value system. The mercenary character of the lawyer—a legal gun for hire —transgresses the class values Jesús holds dear. In his eyes, only the manual labor of a carpenter or farmer is free of the tawdry mess of capitalism.Workers are supposed to provide products that improve people’s lives, or at least provide them with the necessities to live. By contrast, Jesús sees Luis’s work as predatory, and he reduces the legal profession to its most malicious qualities. He does not value the altruism of Luis’s work as a social service lawyer or his developing interest in immigration law. That Luis’s desire for his father’s approval never wanes in the series attests to the tenacity of the macho myth that underwrites Luis’s manhood. Almost entirely absent from Gato Guerrero, Jesús reappears in Last Client. Ill and presumably dying from pulmonary complications attributable to years of work in the coal mines, the frail Jesús still marks the standard against which Luis measures himself. As is apparent when Luis turns to Jesús for advice about the foundational case for the Last Client mystery, he still craves his father’s approval. Despite a court injunction not to leave town because he is a murder suspect, Luis considers sneaking off to California to track down some evidence. Prior to executing his plan, however, he notes, ‘‘Before I did anything, I ran it down for Jesús. He gave me only a few words, but they were important, for both of us. ‘Because you’re my son . . . that means more than just that you once lived in my house. Make this thing right’’’ (100–101; ellipsis in original). Though physically withered and under Luis’s nursing care, Jesús is still the yardstick for power and masculinity in the family. He is the revered don. For Luis to garner his approval is a monumental accomplishment. Although Jesús remains the dominant male in each novel, a key transition late in the series shows Luis possibly learning new ways to realize his manhood. In a tender encounter between father and son, we see the distance between them diminish and the bravado of Chicano masculinity fade away. To grasp the full import of this scene, we must remember that Luis is not so in touch with his masculinity that physical contact with other males comes naturally: ‘‘I never was good at hugging other men in public, even though it’s supposed to be a sign of MANUEL RAMOS’S LUIS MONTEZ SERIES

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Chicano brotherhood’’ (Blues 55). This discomfort brings the relevance of the following scene between Jesús and Luis into sharp relief. Eightysome years old, Jesús has his son shave him: ‘‘Jesús Genaro Montez needed a shave. The gray-and-white growth of three days of beard had a silk-like, almost angel’s-hair texture, but it had to go. I lathered his face and then I glided his Trac II across his wrinkled skin—slowly, oh so slowly’’ (Blues 69). In the context of a Chicano familial patriarchy and in a genre like the hard-boiled detective story, where male braggadocio grossly overdetermines masculinity, this scene takes on significant import because it illustrates how masculinity might be performed in Chicano life. A relationship between two heterosexual males need not always include the reverential distance between master and ephebe, between the father as the distant authority figure and the son as the submissive subject. By the end of this scene Luis and Jesús have returned to their playful verbal banter. Nevertheless, moments like these help us imagine a new masculine performance. Ramos offers a language of possibility for imagining a Chicano manhood not unsettled by physical contact, not wholly circumscribed by authority. NATIONALISM AND CARNALISMO: THE WANING CHICANA/O MOVEMENT

While that language of possibility suggests a move beyond the limitations of nationalism, I cannot simply skip over the nationalist period in analyzing Luis’s character. Though set in the post-nationalist period, the spaces Luis inhabits are replete with vestiges of nationalism and Chicano brotherhood. The following examples, each from a different novel in the series, represent these nationalist traces. In Rocky Ruiz Luis describes his future client’s eyes as ‘‘eyes that will stay with [him] until Chicanos reclaim their lost land of Aztlán—forever’’ (1). The ‘‘forever’’ adds irony to the description, but Aztlán remains a powerful symbolic category for Luis. In Gato Guerrero, we get a snapshot of Luis’s office, where he has his own Aztec wall calendar (29). Even for Luis, who has never completely swallowed the nationalist line, those romantic attachments to the Movement and an indigenous past die hard. Describing his law school class picture, Luis observes, ‘‘I grinned crookedly, obviously high, my long hair bunched up around my shoulders, draped across the peasant shirt all the politically conscious Chicano law students had decided to wear for the class pictures’’ (Last Client 47). The nationalist romanticism continues, but here the reader detects BROWN GUMSHOES

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Luis’s distance from it, as he ironically intones that this sartorial expression was one ‘‘the politically conscious Chicanos’’ pursued. Finally, in Blues for the Buffalo, Luis chides himself for ‘‘drag[ging] out the old Chicano rap’’ to castigate a younger Chicano for being deracinated and ignorant of Chicano and Mexicano history (65). These nationalist vestiges warrant an examination of the discourses of nationalism and carnalismo that inform Luis’s crisis of identity. The residual traces of these discourses complicate and at times undermine Luis’s attempts to forge a new identity. Although he tries to break with the nationalist model, he finds himself surrounded by it. Its omnipresence heightens his ambivalence over his identity, and the nationalist reminders make his transition away from his former identity difficult. Late in the series, Luis searches for the comforting identity he forged in the Movement to counter being rendered invisible, disappearing. One cannot, however, restore an outmoded identity at will. The discourses that shape one’s identity cannot be selected like so many vegetables from the salad bar. They are historically specific. Luis cannot simply tap back into his Movement repertoire to navigate the present. One of the grounding political imperatives of the Montez series is that identity and politics change and that subjects must learn how to accommodate and work with these shifts. So as not to turn mindlessly to obsolete scripts to effect political change, cultural critics must better understand how the historically situated discourses of politics, power, and identity evolve and function. In The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz, the first novel in the series, Luis is compelled to return to the history of the Movement to get to the bottom of the unsolved, Movement-era murder of his former friend, Chicano activist Rocky Ruiz. Rocky, Luis, and the other principal characters in the novel—Tino Pacheco, Orlie Martinez, and Hector Garcia —attended college together and had been active in the Chicano student movement. During that time, a group of hooded men took Rocky into the woods and murdered him. Now, twenty years later, Rocky’s murder haunts his surviving friends, who receive threatening calls that promise to see them all ‘‘end up the same way as Rocky’’ (28). After Tino is murdered, Luis decides he must investigate to protect his friends and himself. The investigation allows Ramos to demonstrate that the past is not easily exorcised, and Luis is not fully prepared to shake it: ‘‘I had tried to tell myself that it [Rocky’s death] was over, that it had been finished that night. But the drops of sweat rolling down Orlie’s face brought it all back, with all the pain and tears, the grief and sadMANUEL RAMOS’S LUIS MONTEZ SERIES

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ness I had locked away with my youth’’ (31). Since Rocky’s death metonymically represents Luis’s involvement in and attachment to the Chicana/o Movement, the pronoun ‘‘it’’ not only stands in for the noun phrase ‘‘Rocky’s death’’ but also refers to the Movement itself—something that Luis has not worked through, but has tellingly ‘‘locked away.’’ He has stored it in the recesses of his subconscious, a subconscious that comes undone with a vengeance in the series. Not unlike the historical frames in Corpi’s novels, the Rocky Ruiz case allows Ramos to return Luis to the specific history and discourses of the Movement and to surround him with his Movement peers, which in turn allows the reader to gauge more carefully Luis’s evolution as a character and the development of the Chicana/o subject in general. In an essay on Chicana/o detective fiction, Ramos himself observed, ‘‘The search for roots, for history, for identity motivates, some would say haunts, the Chicano and Chicana detectives’’ (‘‘Postman and the Mex’’ 166). Luis’s marginal Movement status allows us to historicize his cultural identity and question the commonplace assumption that all Chicana/os in the sixties and seventies walked in lockstep with the tenets of the Movement. When Orlie tells Luis that he has been receiving threatening phone calls related to Rocky’s death, the first clues of Luis’s ambivalent and ambiguous relationship to the Movement surface. He remembers that as students of color they bonded because ‘‘Anglo professors and students’’ dramatically outnumbered them (29), but Luis also makes clear his outsider status, not unlike the alienated private eye: ‘‘I sat in on some of their [Los Guerilleros—easily read as the Brown Berets of the Chicana/o Movement] meetings, but I never wore the beret. I never passed the test, whatever it was, and they and I accepted the fact that because I was on the outside of what they were doing, I could serve as an anchor, a sounding wall to help keep them somewhere near reality’’ (30). This passage establishes two important aspects of Luis’s character. First, it provides an understanding of key events in Luis’s history. Second, it demarcates Luis’s already liminal relationship to the Movement. Even as an acting subject in the Movement, he never became fully indoctrinated into its ideological beliefs. Between these opening scenes and the resolution of the novel, Luis relives much of the Movement’s past and his relation to it. Ramos uses the artifice of having Luis read through Rocky’s personal journal to convey some of the key moments and players in the Movement. The reader hears, for instance, of the Unity conferences that sought BROWN GUMSHOES

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to unite the various Mexican American student groups forming across the nation, and of Reies López Tijerina and his struggle to reclaim Spanish and Mexican land grants in the Southwest, to name only two episodes. It is in the resolution of the mystery, however, that Ramos sets the stage for the development of Luis’s identity crisis in the subsequent novels. As it turns out, Orlie was a police informant sent to infiltrate Los Guerrilleros. When he felt that the other members were on his trail, he accused Rocky of being an informant to divert their attention. To make a long story short, when Orlie and Hector take Rocky to the woods to scare him straight, they inadvertently kill him. Teresa, Rocky’s daughter, finds out about this dirty little history and attempts to avenge Rocky’s death. The moment that best registers Luis’s ambivalence toward the past and his search for a new post-nationalist identity comes when he reflects on Orlie’s death: Orlie had taken the myth of the movement from me. The illusions I had had about those years died next to him on my bloodstained office carpet. Los Guerrilleros, Orlie, Tino, and Hector, the marches and picket lines—they lost their hold over me when the ugly truth about Rocky’s death crawled out of Orlie’s mouth. The one thing that I had found was Rocky. I had forgotten what he had meant to me, what it was that made his life important. Now it was solid in my heart and Orlie could not take that. Rocky was the real movement and I guess I finally figured out what it was all about. (197–198)

This reflection dislocates Luis from the past. The death he locked away along with his youth has been unleashed. In unmooring that past, however, Luis has resolved very little. Yes, the whodunit has been solved and in that revelation the reader learns much about Luis’s character. But Luis is left with an identity in flux. Hence we get the tenuous ‘‘I guess I finally figured out,’’ rather than the more definitive assertion, ‘‘I had finally figured it all out.’’ Indeed, Luis has much more to figure out about the post-nationalist Chicana/o subject and his/her identity. I turn now to the remainder of the series to address the question of Luis’s identity in flux. ABEYANCE OR TRANSITION?: THE SEARCH FOR GATO GUERRERO

In The Ballad of Gato Guerrero, Ramos takes great pains to construct Luis as a detached private investigator. He emphasizes Luis not as the MANUEL RAMOS’S LUIS MONTEZ SERIES

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angst-ridden Chicano subject, but as the distant spectator. He accomplishes this primarily by directing the focus away from Luis. The mystery does not tie into a key historical moment from Luis’s past, as in Rocky Ruiz. Rather, Luis must account for the disappearance of his friend Felix ‘‘Gato’’ Guerrero and Gato’s lover, Elizabeth Anglin. Luis works on this case strictly out of a personal interest in his friend’s wellbeing. His own self is not on the line here, as it potentially was in Rocky and most certainly is in Last Client and Blues. In contrast to these other novels, the prefatory note to Gato reveals a self-possessed Luis Montez: ‘‘After years of scraping by, I suddenly found myself to be an involved, culturally aware person—Mr. Cool and Clean—a man on the brink of success or at least in terms of paying my bills.’’ Luis would have us believe that he is the cool, detached spectator, and through much of the novel, he is the lone private eye walking down the mean streets. In his dichotomized sense of good and evil and his desire to right wrong, he even occasionally sounds like Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe, the quintessential private eye: ‘‘I went off on a fantasy about making things right for Felix and dragging down the bad guys in the process’’ (171). Nevertheless, while Luis strikes this Mr. Cool pose, his personal crisis is only temporarily held in abeyance; he remains inextricably entangled with issues of identity. Placing Luis at the party of one of his friend’s teenage children, Ramos foregrounds Luis’s transition from a youthful, Movement-era activist to an older man. The supposedly cool, detached spectator struggles with his aging as he enters the party: ‘‘Young Chicana eyes cruised my face for a clue of recognition, but they didn’t linger. I was older than their attention span [. . .]. The boys checked me out and then ignored me when it was obvious I didn’t present a threat to their women or turf’’ (96–97). While Luis has not yet reached the ontological angst of racial invisibility that he will in Last Client, he feels a palpable dis-ease among these youth. At this party of Chicana/o youth, his race should mark him as an insider, but his age plays against him. He finds himself an outsider among a crowd of what he would describe as deracinated gang youth. As this passage continues, we witness even more clearly a subject in transition, a subject working through his identification: The days when I would have fit in this party scene were long gone. As I watched the crowd build to overflowing, I could almost see bright dividing lines for the sections of my life—jigsaw-puzzle pieces spread across the floor, kicked and

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shoved under Jenny’s [his friend and client’s] dumpy couch by the dancing feet of young raza. [. . .] Now, I attended parties because of the need to connect with a potential client, or pump the sweaty hand of a judge, or publicly cut open my veins so the assorted bloodsuckers who hovered at those affairs could swoop down on the ethnic professional and slurp my last drop of chicanismo. I felt a bit lost, almost nostalgic, at this gathering of barrio warriors and their princesses, where no one wanted a piece of my wallet and I wasn’t obligated to circulate my business card. (97)

The scene encapsulates how Ramos uses Luis to think through the contemporary import of subject, identity, and agency. Luis’s alienation belies the cool, self-possessed, lawyer-on-the-verge-of-making-it act that he presented in the prefatory note to the novel. The teen party pulls Luis right back into the drama of his cultural identity. The opening sentence illustrates his awareness that he no longer belongs to his past. The party and its dividing lines highlight the processes Luis has gone through in creating his identities. With the jigsaw puzzle metaphor, he explicitly references and recognizes his fragmented identity. The comparison of the gangbanger party and Luis’s professional soirées sets up insightful lines of parity and disparity between these social events; both are about establishing turf and networking. The players’ success in these maneuvers depends upon recognition from the other attendees. At either affair acceptance hinges on maintaining an insider look. The ‘‘older’’ Luis is no more out of place in his sport coat and tie at the teen party than these youth would be at one of his business parties. This scene also forces Luis to contend with his nostalgia for the past. For members of an older generation who feel displaced from a contemporary scene, wondering about their future in the community is an endemic plight. Like Corpi and Hinojosa’s characters, Luis is tempted by that fruit of a blind recognition of the past. He would like to remember it as something it never was, but he resists. Despite his prefatory claims that he was settling into his legal practice, the professional networking he has become accustomed to alienates him at the party and makes him long to be a ‘‘barrio warrior,’’ so he can place his masculinity on display for his ‘‘princess.’’ Not one of the youth schmoozes with him for professional gain. They are not part of that social sphere. Consequently, Luis finds himself tempted to retreat to and romanticize his youth. But again, he does not fall for this temptation. Instead he recalls the vexing time he had when he was twenty. Like these youth, he was ‘‘digging out bits of misplaced cultural identity wherever [he] could find them’’ (162).

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While he may not be content with his current station in life, nothing can recommend that past as a salve for his existential wounds. The vampiristic imagery Luis uses in discussing his professional identity—‘‘cut open my veins so the assorted bloodsuckers [. . .] could swoop down’’—discloses how he thinks about race. The language of vampirism taps into a history of race as determined by blood, i.e., the hypodescent theories of the nineteenth century. Luis accepts that model as he worries that his potential clientele and business associates will ‘‘slurp [his] last drop of chicanismo.’’ For Luis, race is more biologically coded than socially constructed. This point is important because it is the physical markings of race that underscore Luis’s invisibility and disappearance anxiety in Last Client and Blues. Regardless of whether one believes race to be socially constructed or biologically determined, in the United States, race produces effects. For Luis, those effects entail losing his cultural identity to his professional one. Ramos attempts to shift attention away from Luis in Gato Guerrero by making him a detached observer. As Luis repeatedly tells us, ‘‘I was a character in a gritty morality play, pushed and pulled by the other actors, and yet I had the unnerving sensation of watching everything happening while I stood around and tried to make sense of it all’’ (83– 84). Luis, however, doth protest too much. Even as a supposed spectator, his character evolves. In Gato, Ramos presents Luis as in a crucial transitional phase in his movement from ambivalence to anxiety. This anxiety reaches a fevered pitch in Last Client and Blues. INVISIBILITY BLUES 7

In Last Client, Ramos returns Luis’s identity crisis to the focal center. While the novel opens with Luis defending James P. Esch against the people of the state of Colorado, it quickly shifts to focus on Luis, who is set up as the prime suspect in the murder of his own client and the disappearance of James’s sister, Lisa Esch. To aggravate matters, Luis is subsequently accused of suborning perjury from one of the police officers in the Esch case. Not a good day for Luis. No longer the spectator watching the play unfold, Luis stands front and center on the stage, where he must rehearse the scripts of racial identity and racialization. Battling with forces that would render him not only guilty but also invisible is no mean feat. His invisibility is predicated on his racial identity. He does not have the luxury of a supposedly stable, nationalist,

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Chicano identity in this post-nationalist, racialized world. Among the discourses surrounding him, Luis must find new sites of attachment to suture together his fragmented identity.8 Placing Luis in a tunnel of despair darker than any he has previously navigated, Ramos increases the tension surrounding Luis. To put together a case that will save him from his legal troubles and protect him from Jimmy Esch’s killer, Luis holes up in a rented room, where an almost wholesale evisceration of his identity takes place: ‘‘I no longer thought of myself as a lawyer, or a worn-out, middle-aged male, or a Chicano adrift in an uptight, vindictive Anglo world. I was a core of something without an identity. I was a fever [. . .]’’ (152–153). Luis is no longer simply ‘‘fed up with [his] scraggly-assed existence as a borderline lawyer’’ (Rocky Ruiz 3). He confronts here a deepened identity crisis. The metaphor of disease (i.e., Luis’s fever) suggests the physical aspects of racialized (in)visibility. A pathology pervades racism that renders the racially marked body diseased; if Ramos is to offer a more complex understanding of Chicana/o identity, he must investigate this crisis. This entails asking what happens when a subject feels the core of his/her identity emptied of all content. The discourses of race and racism that run through the novel engender Luis’s identity crisis. I argue that the lack of a collective counterdiscourse to combat racism cuts Luis’s identity adrift in Last Client. A post-nationalist sequel to Invisible Man (1952), Last Client rewrites Ralph Ellison’s now-classic investigation of racialization, but with a difference. Ramos invites us to consider how race and invisibility ramify beyond the black/white binary, which too often effaces the complexity of race and ethnicity as they are lived in the United States. The black/white binary reduces race to a dichotomy that fails to account for racial markings and performances beyond the normative poles of whiteness and blackness.9 Like Ellison, Ramos inquires into the complexities and nuances of race and invisibility. Luis, however, cannot summarily dismiss invisibility as a liability. To be a successful detective, for instance, he must at times remain invisible. Under court order not to leave Denver, Luis must find a way to conceal his identity because the success of his case depends on him getting to California to track down exculpatory evidence. His vindication depends on his invisibility. The problem of invisibility arises, however, when people refuse to see him. When Luis contemplates the need to be invisible to escape town,

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the dehumanizing racism on which invisibility is predicated frustrates him: ‘‘I had been the invisible man for most of my life. After I realized what it meant, it amazed me, and angered me, too, but I had accepted it. I’d enter a room, and no one would say anything to me; no one would catch my eye or engage in the small talk that surrounded me. I hated cocktail parties, receptions, icebreakers—anything that required me to meet new people and actually talk with them, and the main reason was my invisibility’’ (102). Luis sounds like Ellison’s anonymous protagonist, who notes that ‘‘I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. [. . .] When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me’’ (97). Both Ellison’s protagonist and Luis are ignored because of their race or seen as a stereotype of the black man or the Chicano. Others fail to see these characters’ unique humanity. The problematic of invisibility asks us to consider the relationship between agency and ethics. When Luis strives not to be seen, he exercises his will to occlude his being in order to be a better detective. He merely needs to find the best way to disguise or hide himself. By contrast, in a social situation, where he must interact with others, he runs up against the racial discourses that structure these interracial encounters. He cannot control others’ actions and reactions toward him. The ethics at play here are charged by a responsibility to the other that racial discourses complicate and bring to the fore. Summarizing Emmanuel Levinas’s position on the ethics of social interactions, Jeff Nealon writes, ‘‘Ethics is born and maintained through the necessity of performative response to the other person, and such a responsiveness (which he calls ‘responsibility’) comes necessarily before the solidification of any theoretical rules or political norms of ethical conduct’’ (Alterity Politics 34). Levinas’s favored trope for describing this ethical process is the face-to-face encounter with the other. As soon as we face the other we take responsibility for the other and must act, yet at the same time the scripts for this interaction are never known in advance (ibid. 34–35).10 In Ellison and Ramos, race overdetermines this interaction, and when their characters have these encounters their inability to exercise their agency (to produce effects) frustrates them. These encounters manifest precisely how discourses structure our lives, and in recognizing the limits on their wills to power, the characters find themselves in a nearly unbearable identity crisis. Juxtaposing scenes from Ramos and Ellison illuminates the ethics BROWN GUMSHOES

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and structuring of interracial encounters. I pick up where we left Luis in Last Client, contemplating his invisibility: I sometimes grabbed a person I knew, looked him in the face, and forced an acknowledgment. The lucky target invariably would blink, take a second look, then say, ‘‘Hey, Louie, how you doing?—didn’t see you.’’ This happened most often with white people, at bar committee meetings, task forces, even court appearances. The people in the meeting had no idea what I looked like, what my name was. If I saw one later in the street or an elevator, I’d say hello, and the guy would look around, maybe step back, and say hello in return, to be polite, but he wouldn’t know me. [. . .] I was a minority filling a slot, and that’s all he had to know. (102)

In this scene, the reader hears clear echoes of Ellison’s Invisible Man. From his subterranean home, Ellison’s protagonist reflects on his encounters with a man who refused to see him: One night I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the near darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name. I sprang at him, seized his coat lapels and demanded that he apologize. He was a tall blond man, and as my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me, his breath hot in my face as he struggled. I pulled his chin down sharp upon the crown of my head, butting him as I had seen the West Indians do, and I felt his flesh tear and blood gush out, and I yelled, ‘‘Apologize! Apologize!’’ [Narrator continues to beat the man and prepares to stab him] when it occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare! [. . .] It unnerved me. I was both disgusted and ashamed. (8)

In each case, the protagonist must force the face-to-face encounter with his other because the other tries to evade his responsibility. The interesting difference is that in a post–civil rights, affirmative action world, Luis, as a lawyer, wields some cultural capital. When Luis confronts his other, that person must act, if only so that s/he can forget Luis thereafter. Or, worse than forgetting, s/he may conclude that Luis was only hired to fill a quota. People who grossly misunderstand affirmative action resort to this logic of quotas to understand the slowly diversifying professional class.11 Nevertheless, as the final lines from the above scene indicate, Luis still assumes responsibility for the other’s refusal to acknowledge him: ‘‘Maybe it was me. Maybe I had to wear louder clothes, or speak louder, or do anything louder’’ (102). He thinks he might be able to compel his interlocutor to recognize him. MANUEL RAMOS’S LUIS MONTEZ SERIES

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By contrast, Ellison’s protagonist cannot force a recognition or apology from his other. The anonymous narrator has no cultural capital that his interlocutor must acknowledge. From the beginning to the end of the interaction, he remains a phantom to his blonde menace. Resorting to physical violence gives him not a whit more agency, only feelings of disgust and shame; he bears the ethical brunt of the entire interaction. His disgust and shame result from his recognition that he has no agency. He mistakenly believed he could force the man to enter into a social compact where each face would be accountable to the other. In both the Ramos and Ellison encounters, the racialization of the protagonists underscores the operations of power and identity at play. The characters’ respective brownness and blackness renders them invisible to their others. These scenes demonstrate both how agency can produce effects and how it can be circumscribed. By novel’s end, Luis’s invisibility climaxes. Despite having resolved the novel’s mysteries, his identity continues to dissolve, yet in the final scene, the invisibility is of a different order. Luis enjoys what David Riesman famously called the ‘‘lonely crowd’’: ‘‘I had made it to a baseball game. I had survived. [. . .] Thin streams of tears traced their way down my face. I let myself go with the crowd. I turned invisible’’ (193– 194). Much of relevance comes out in this final scene of Last Client. First, as if by will, Luis becomes invisible: ‘‘I turned invisible.’’ He does not turn invisible because the crowd, like the professionals at the business parties, refuses to see him—he exercises his own power to make himself invisible. He has expunged himself from the police’s wanted files. Second, he sheds his identities to become part of a crowd that in the cultural lexicon of the United States is definitively American. Baseball, like apple pie, resonates with the cultural chords that sing America. Ramos’s choice of the baseball stadium as the site for his character’s invisibility is an interesting one. In a racialized country like the United States, baseball presents a curious dilemma. Latinos constitute 20 percent of major league players and 40 percent of all professional baseball players. At the baseball stadium, fans, some of them certainly racist, seemingly ignore race. If not in daily life, then at least in the sports and entertainment industries, race can be accepted. Some of these fans may even support tighter border control, yet they see no contradiction in cheering for immigrant Latino players who improve their teams’ records.Would they think so openly about Latina/os who lack celebrity status? Will they work to end racism on the border? In Luis’s willed inBROWN GUMSHOES

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visibility, he writes himself into this quintessential American cultural scene. Lest this scene become a paean to baseball and American race relations, it must be read against other scenes in which Luis confronts the very racism that renders him invisible. He does not leave the Colorado Rockies stadium a fully integrated and agentive Chicana/o subject. He is only temporarily absorbed into the lonely crowd. Ramos is careful not to present us with a lionized protagonist who has no faults, so I would be mistaken to leave this discussion of race and invisibility without dealing with Luis’s own racial hang-ups.When Luis hitches a ride with an African American man (Percival Jones, aka Perk) to get to California, his racism surfaces most prominently. Debating whether to accept a ride from an African American man he does not know, Luis falls into the familiar racist position of imagining a black man as a threat to his life. His first impulse is to read that unfamiliar black face as the face of Alton Enoch, an African American criminal whom Luis had identified earlier in Last Client as having a ‘‘psychotic mentality’’ and a ‘‘distinctive, volatile disposition’’ (42; 111). In a similar racist exchange, Perk refers to the brown man before him as ‘‘Pancho’’ (111). Through Luis and Perk’s interactions, Ramos complicates the reductive identity politics notion that would supposedly ally all people of color in common cause. Racism pervades and structures all social relations, not just those between whites and people of color. Further, Ramos refuses the panacea that people’s goodwill alone will eradicate racism. Instead, he insists on the more complicated and thoughtful idea that the discourses of racism are historically informed. Thus, Luis must attempt to express why he hesitated to get in the car with Perk: ‘‘Look, I probably got as much racism in me as any non-black male who was raised in this country in the 1950s. I tried to deal with that long ago, but if there’s any of it left, all I can say is that I apologize. I take people for what they do, not what they are. You don’t have to believe me, but that’s all I can say’’ (119). The 1950s reference illustrates that Luis is aware of the historical situatedness of discursive practices and the residual traces they bear. In other words, Luis lives in a post-nationalist, post–civil rights movement world, but he is still a product of his past. His connection to the past cannot excuse his racism, but it helps us understand the structures and effects of social interactions and identities. Nevertheless, Luis still accepts Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that people will one day judge each other by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Given the racial tensions that run through the Luis Montez MANUEL RAMOS’S LUIS MONTEZ SERIES

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series and the shaping force that race has on Luis’s own character, it is inconsistent, if not naïve, to expect Perk to accept that Luis ‘‘takes people for what they do.’’ In the present, the physical markings of race still shape social relations. To pretend otherwise is delusional. Luis’s anxiety over being invisible belies this naïveté. In Blues for the Buffalo, Ramos follows the fears of invisibility with those of disappearance, the next logical step in this existential crisis. BLUES FOR THE BUFFALO: NOW YOU SEE HIM, NOW YOU DON’T

In a particularly adroit narrative move, Ramos aligns the plot of the mystery in Blues with Luis’s ontological concerns about disappearing. In other words, Luis finds himself working on a missing-person case. As Blues begins, Luis is on a beach in Mexico recovering from the gunshot wound he sustained at the end of Last Client. There he runs into Rachel Vargas (aka Rachel Espinosa), an aspiring young writer. When she disappears shortly after their meeting, a young Chicano detective (Conrad ‘‘Rad’’ Valdez) enlists Luis’s help in tracking her down. Through a fabricated patrimony narrative, Ramos connects Luis’s search for the fictional Rachel to the disappearance of the real-life Chicano author and activist lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta (aka the Brown Buffalo). Ultimately, Luis discovers why Rachel has disappeared, but he never finds her. Similarly, no one has ever accounted for the disappearance of Acosta, who in 1974 vanished off the shores of Mexico. Into this narrative Ramos weaves a story about deracinated Chicana/o youth, whom Luis characterizes as living in a ubiquitous present. This presentism frightens Luis because it means his past will not be known and is thus under threat of disappearing. Luis, who has ‘‘drifted into a steaming funk of idle humanity’’ (3), cannot afford this vanishing act. As he tries to construct an identity from the shards of the past and the new, unknown scripts of the present, his fear of disappearing exacerbates his identity crisis. Rachel’s case underscores the role of the past in creating an identity. Blues for the Buffalo suggests that in the absence of a genealogy one cannot fully realize one’s identity.12 Rachel, who is in her early twenties, has been led to believe that she is the adopted daughter of Oscar and Lucille Vargas and the adoptive sister of Jaime, Francisco, and Patricia. She knows that her biological mother (Elena Satana) was a Mexi-

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can national who resided illegally in the United States and worked in a laundry sweatshop and who, Rachel has been told, died at the age of nineteen while giving birth to her. Rachel learns her personal history from Oscar Vargas, who leads her to believe that as an adopted child she is beneath the ‘‘blue-blood’’ Vargas clan, whose lineage dates back to pre-conquest California. For years, Jaime has been sexually molesting Rachel. When she threatens to tell their father about the molestation, Jaime concocts the story about Acosta being Rachel’s father. This sends Rachel on a quest for her identity. To know who she is, she needs to know her past. As Rad, the novel’s junior P.I. and Rachel’s boyfriend, recalls, ‘‘She became obsessed with [. . .] the Chicano Movement [. . .]. It was as if she needed that history to give herself some history’’ (46–47). Ramos uses the Movement to yoke Rachel and Luis’s struggles together. Her search for identity draws her back to the Movement, the very time period that seemingly once gave meaning to Luis’s life. Even more than the other novels in the series, Blues draws Luis back into this past. In my analysis of The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz, I argued that Luis maintained an ambivalent and distant relationship to the Chicana/o Movement, but in Blues Ramos constructs a series of characters and events around him that refuse to let him simply slide away from that past. In light of the ending of Last Client, I would argue that it is a past that Ramos must have Luis revisit. Like Rachel, he has to investigate further his connection to that bygone moment to understand his present self. He must make sense of this dissonance between past and present, lest he disappear along with the cultural markers of his past. To add to this inquiry, Ramos gives Luis a young Chicano sidekick, Rad Valdez. Working with this young Chicano forces Luis to make explicit his investment in the Movement and his take on contemporary Chicana/o identity. In the exchanges between Rad and Luis about Chicana/o history (a subject in which Luis feels Rad is woefully deficient), the engagement between past and present reaches its most fevered and interesting pitch. Luis’s concern over Rad’s lack of historical knowledge signals that he feels there are real stakes in knowing about history. He is, after all, not worried about Rad’s knowledge of geometry, physics, or biology. No, this interest in Chicana/o and Mexicana/o history underscores Luis’s concern about cultural identity and his need to see his own history remembered, thus validating his identity. Under peril and in flux, then, Luis must find a way to anchor his cul-

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tural identity. Rather than look to the present, he turns to Acosta and tries to explain to Rad the historical importance of the affirming identity Acosta offered in a time of blatant and omnipresent racism: Back when I was a young guy like you, Chicanos were around, obviously, we were living in this state [Colorado], but there wasn’t anything about us, anywhere. In some places it was illegal to speak Spanish in public. That’s in Zeta’s books. Chicano kids in school didn’t have much of a chance, unless they had incredible luck, or balls, like Acosta. [. . .] A trite term back then was that we were the sleeping giant, waiting to wake up and kick the society that had ignored us and put us down. But I always thought the image was wrong. We weren’t sleeping, and we certainly were no giant.We were individuals and families busting our asses, running scared, doing the best we could. We were called pachucos, zoot suiters, braceros, wetbacks, Spanish-surnamed, greasers and spics, dirty Mexicans—everything except what we really are because we didn’t have a face, a consciousness—no identity, man. Not until we understood about being Chicano. And that’s where Zeta comes in. He understood. About identity, about struggle. (64–65)

In trying to educate Rad, Luis turns to his nationalist passions, which paint the racial crisis in broad brush strokes and miss the finer details of the portrait. He pits oppressor against oppressed and has no trouble distinguishing who belongs to which group. Though he is less than subtle, Luis illustrates the historical specificity of Acosta’s efforts. Acosta worked within the structuring racial discourses of the sixties and seventies to produce a Chicana/o identity capable of battling against racist forces that sought to denigrate and contain Chicana/os. Luis goes on to tell Rad that Acosta’s efforts and those of the Movement were ‘‘only a stage. An absolutely essential, required, historically manifested piece of our people’s progress, but it was only a stage’’ (65). Significantly, Luis recognizes that producing an identity is what matters, and that producing that identity was just one moment in Chicana/o history, a stage to be passed through and learned from, not an endpoint to be achieved. This is precisely what detective novelists like the ones I examine here are grappling with—the construction of an identity that understands the complexities of the quotidian lives of Chicana/os and the discourses that they must work with and against in forging an identity capable of producing effects. Ramos, however, refuses the opportunity to write Luis off as a nationalist anachronism. When Luis finishes with Rad, he questions his own motives and investments in the past: ‘‘Deep down, I argued with BROWN GUMSHOES

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myself. As I talked, I did not swallow everything I mouthed. I couldn’t. Why did I have to drag out the old Chicano rap?’’ (ibid.). He celebrates the past because he still has one foot there, even while the other is firmly planted in the present. He is a Chicano subject in transition. Residing in that liminal space between nationalism and post-nationalism, Luis searches for an identity that will allow him to bridge two historical moments. He simply has not found it yet. In light of his fear of invisibility and disappearance, he resorts to the past, in which identity seemed more stable. Feeling his own identity threatened, Luis turns to Rad, this younger Chicano, to shore up his defenses against disappearance. In Rad, Luis sees his other self: ‘‘Tu eres mi otro yo. You are my other self. I see myself in you, Rad, so many years ago [. . .]’’ (152). I read this exchange both as a personal assessment and a communal one. Luis, that is, sees in Rad a specific extension of himself, the young Chicano detective who will carry on his legacy. But within that larger narrative, Rad also emblematizes the carrying on of Chicana/o traditions. His is not just a personal legacy, but a communal one. This is precisely why Luis is worried about Rad’s generation’s ignorance of history. Within this existential and historical search for identity lies a spatial and geographic one as well. Throughout the series Denver is a distinct, almost character-like, background. Ramos details how the gentrification of downtown Denver, the coming of the Colorado Rockies, and the development of gambling casinos have changed the atmosphere of his hometown. For Luis, these geographic changes affect his sense of self. He no longer recognizes himself in his old familiar haunts and finds the city increasingly more difficult to navigate: ‘‘The new library had to be bigger and, therefore, more difficult to use, even though it might be better looking. But Denver was changing—new airport and baseball stadium, light rail, and, next, the library—new and prettier accoutrements for the queen of the plains, and there was not much I could do about the accessorization of my hometown. There were days when I did not recognize the city’’ (Blues 149). These orchestrated changes are not just the inevitable evolution of the urban landscape. They do not just happen. They are planned to improve business, and they portend shifts in people’s identities. A host of cultural geographers have attested that space bears directly on social relations.13 For Luis, not recognizing his hometown is tantamount to not recognizing himself. Recall that he points out the importance of the built enMANUEL RAMOS’S LUIS MONTEZ SERIES

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vironment for his identity: ‘‘Almost every street in northern Denver— hell, almost every building—represented a piece of my past’’ (24). Thus, the spatial changes Ramos depicts throughout the Montez series weigh in on the ontological scales that hold identity in the balance. These shifts become especially important as the markers of Luis’s identity give way to urban development. The nexus between space and social relations is even more apparent when a firebombing destroys a local bookstore that had provided an intellectual haven and bastion of solitude for barrio dwellers, who at every turn feel the pressure of urban development weigh against their daily existence: ‘‘She’s [the owner of the bookstore] trying to bring something to the community, give the neighborhood a chance, maybe a chance just to think, if that’s what they need. Not much time for thinking around here’’ (25). Denver is changing, and those changes play into the cultural crisis Luis and other Chicana/os experience.14 That these changes are most fully realized in Blues is consonant with the novel’s larger theme of a threatened Chicana/o identity on the brink of disappearance. In Blues’ closing lines, Luis accentuates this crisis, as he turns to the final pages of Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo: ‘‘‘And I do not want to live in a world without brown buffalos’’’ (215). By this point Luis feels a number of stings: the death of Charlotte García and Bobby Baca, his Chicana/o compañeros from the Movement; his anxiety over deracinated, alienated Chicana/o youth; and the loss of the ‘‘sureties’’ of a nationalist identity. Brown buffalos not only disappear, they are disappeared. This prospect heightens Luis’s blues. That Rachel is never found does not augur well for the future. Ramos’s Luis Montez series bears affinities to Hinojosa’s, Nava’s, and Corpi’s work, but it also adds a new dimension to the discussion of a post-nationalist Chicana/o identity and the discourses that shape it and through which it produces effects. Like Corpi, Ramos feels connected to the years that marked the emergence of a contestatory Chicana/o subject. He sympathizes with the goals and achievements of that period, but he also tries to distance himself from it, resulting in a cultural ambivalence that he, like Corpi, must contend with. Unlike the Damasco series, the Montez books show the shaping force of masculinity on the male subject. The progress made in gender relations over the last several years forces him to confront his male privilege, and the hard-boiled genre in which Ramos writes makes this confrontation more interesting. Just as Luis questions his masculinity, he must also vie with a host of other discourses—carnalismo, lawyering, and BROWN GUMSHOES

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race and racism—that impinge on his identity. While these discourses were once part of the nationalist paradigm, they inflect differently in the post-nationalist world. To surrender the fictitious, unified identity of the Movement is to confront the uncertainties and provisional status of subject and identity in the present. For Luis Montez and for many Chicana/os of his generation, this encounter often results in a fear of invisibility that culminates with the dread of disappearance.Yet to understand the complexities of Chicana/o identity, one must walk away from the comfort of the past, a departure that can cause a crisis of identity as it forces the actors in this drama to surrender their old, familiar scripts and learn a new set of lines. Nevertheless, it is a crisis that must be risked if we are to understand post-nationalist Chicana/o identities.

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chapter 5

RUDOLFO ANAYA’S SONNY BACA SERIES GOVERNING THE SELF IN A SEA OF CHANGE

While other mystery writers like Manuel Ramos and Lucha Corpi participated in the Chicana/o Movement as activists, Rudolfo Anaya took on special significance for la causa Chicana. Along with other cultural workers such as Alurista, Corky Gonzales, and Luis Valdez, he was one of the heralds and scribes of cultural nationalism. His writing in general, and Bless Me, Ultima (1972) in particular, provided a vital resource for a better understanding of the relation of Mesoamerican cultural practices to Chicana/o identity. He illustrated how spiritual, mystical, and mythical beliefs could be recuperated and synthesized to bring to realization a distinctive, self-empowered Chicana/o subject that was deeply invested in making claims on indigenous and Spanish culture as it forged a unique ‘‘New World’’ identity. Later, writing some two decades after the demise of the Chicana/o Movement in 1975, Anaya again turns to the mystical elements of New Mexico as he stages his battle between the forces of good and evil in his Sonny Baca trilogy— Zia Summer (1995), Rio Grande Fall (1996), and Shaman Winter (1999).1 In other words, he pursues a cultural nationalist articulation of Chicana/o identity at a time when that articulation lacks an explanatory power for grappling with the conditions and circumstances of contemporary Chicana/o subjects. Though written in a hard-boiled style, Anaya’s detective fiction swerves interestingly away from liberal conceptions of the political sphere associated with hard-boiled detective fiction from the 1930s to the 1960s. As Sean McCann persuasively argues in Gumshoe America (2000), hard-boiled crime fiction provided a cultural analog to the political debates about liberalism and the governance of society. According to a liberal model of the State, individuals submit to laws that they

may feel are not their own or with which they may disagree because such a submission is in their rational self-interest. During the New Deal era the government sought to check the political and economic elites who were shaping political and business affairs in such a way that the individual’s rational self-interest was no longer served. Thus the conception of liberal society passed through a number of rearticulations (16–35). McCann deftly argues that ‘‘in their efforts to imagine a democratic literature and a reformed literary marketplace, the creators of hard-boiled crime fiction [Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, and Chester Himes] turned successively to analogs of each of these political visions [i.e., the evolving liberal ideology from the 1930s to the 1960s]’’ (35). Written some three decades after the terminal point of McCann’s argument, Rudolfo Anaya’s Sonny Baca series offers a different vision of governance and self-interest. As articulated in the Baca series, the governance of the Nuevo Mexicana/o depends not on the laws of State, but on a struggle between good and evil that is connected to rescuing the ‘‘ways of the ancestors.’’ In other words, the success of the social contract and the longevity of the Nuevo Mexicana/o population hinge on understanding the history, mythology, and folkways of those whom Anaya identifies as the ‘‘señores y señoras de la luz’’ 2 (the lords and ladies of the light). I am not suggesting that these Nuevo Mexicana/o subjects have transcended the authority and power of the State. Indeed, as Foucault’s model of governmentality would suggest, these other forms of governance, while sundry in their realizations, are still immanent to the State.3 I would not want to pretend, that is, that the practices of differing forms of governance in the Baca series set Anaya’s Nuevo Mexicana/os in a transcendent position to State governance. But if we consider the relationship between the rhetoric of governance and the detective novel, we see a shift in Anaya from the liberal model McCann charts, with individuals submitting to laws for rational self-interest, to a practice of governance in the Baca series staked to community interest. To understand this shift, the discourses of race, origins, history, and spiritualism through which these strategies of governance and identification operate must be analyzed. These discourses become grounding elements in Sonny’s struggle to shore up his identity so that he will be best prepared to battle the forces of evil, as represented by the series’s antagonist, Anthony Pájaro (aka Raven). Unlike most other series detective fiction, where the hero is a RUDOLFO ANAYA’S SONNY BACA SERIES

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constant and the criminals change from novel to novel, in the Sonny Baca series, both the hero and the villain remain the same. Readers are, that is, presented with an ongoing metaphysical and mystical battle between the ‘‘forces of dark and light,’’ between Raven and Sonny, respectively. Moreover, we are asked to believe that their personal battle bears consequences for the material lives of Anaya’s everyday Nuevo Mexicana/os. Ultimately, what Anaya examines in the series is how, in the face of a presentist and commodified culture, it is possible to behave as a moral subject and thereby save not only one’s own life but also the life of one’s community. As Anaya’s protagonist frequently worries, the contemporary moment is that of el hombre dorado, in which commercialization has caused people to lose their souls: ‘‘The beautiful people of Hollywood, television, movies, caricatures surrounding themselves with luxury, coated with a gold sheen but empty inside. Even here in the North Valley we have those who cover themselves with the sheen of gold, all over the city we have the hombres dorados, men of empty promises’’ (Zia 362). In the final analysis, I think this strategy founders on its own mysticism and its quest for spiritual answers to material conundrums.4 DOCUMENTS AND MONUMENTS: CONSTRUCTING THE PAST

As with Hinojosa, Corpi, and Ramos, the fear of being effaced by history surfaces in Anaya’s series as well. This fear is part of a generational and ideological tie to the Movement era and the encroachment of commercial development into Baca’s homeland. As Manuel Ramos notes, ‘‘A sense of loss—sadness really—surrounds Sonny Baca. He sees with every sunrise the erosion of a bit more of the folklore, history and heritage of the indigenous Native Americans and the early Chicano settlements. Greed, excess, and cheap pop culture have invaded his beloved state and established long-term encampments. The clash of values that is a hallmark of the West of the ’90s is one more round in the match between Raven and Baca’’ (‘‘New Mexico’’ D-08). Anaya’s historical sense, however, is distinct from that of his peers Corpi and Hinojosa. For unlike them, he constructs a hero and series in which history operates as a static context for present dilemmas. Baca seems to believe he can simply and transparently access a past moment to counter oppressive contemporary conditions. Before analyzing the shaping force of historical discourses in the BROWN GUMSHOES

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three Baca novels, I want to recount briefly the plot trajectory of the series so that we might better comprehend how history functions in these texts. In Zia Summer, Sonny, a hapless wanderer, has just begun his career as a private investigator. He gets involved with the Gloria Dominic murder case because she is his cousin. This initial murder sets in motion the series-long battle between Sonny and Raven, for as the reader learns, it was Raven and members of his Zia cult who killed Gloria. A monomaniac, Raven wants to destroy the world so that he can rule it in the ‘‘New World Order,’’ which will come with the next cycle of the sun. Gloria was sacrificed because she threatened to expose the Zia cult when she found out that their beliefs go beyond spiritual practices—they want to blow up a truck transporting nuclear waste to Carlsbad, ostensibly to scare people away from the uses of nuclear energy. Really what they want to do is carry out Raven’s desire to destroy the world. Throughout the series, the planned destruction, apropos of the novels’ setting in New Mexico, hinges on the use of nuclear weapons. Sonny, of course, foils the plot to blow up the truck, but before he does so the novel introduces what will be the central themes of the series: the eternal struggle between ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘evil’’; the waning of the ways of the ancestors in the face of an increasing commercialization and commodification of culture; and the displacement of native Nuevo Mexicana/os as a result of urban development. Rio Grande Fall is principally a transitional novel that illustrates the lengths to which Raven will go to acquire a nuclear weapon. In a scheme that mirrors the Iran-Contra scandal, Raven is involved in a racket of trading drugs for weapons. Over the course of the novel, Anaya presents much New Mexican history, and Sonny advances through his apprenticeship to learn the ways of the elders. By novel’s end, Raven has taken off for the Ukraine, purportedly to purchase the plutonium and intelligence necessary to build an atomic bomb. He returns to New Mexico for the series’s climax in Shaman Winter, and here the shaping force of history comes to the fore. Anaya introduced his readers to the customs, habits, and history of New Mexico in Zia Summer and Rio Grande Fall, and in Shaman Winter they come front and center. In this final installment, Raven fights to eliminate Sonny from history by taking four maternal grandmothers from his bloodline. According to don Eliseo, Sonny’s mentor and spiritual guide, ‘‘There are four roots to a man’s history. [. . .] As there are four sacred directions from the Center. Four quadrants of the universe. He [Raven] needs to take four grandmothers in order to kill your spirit’’ (Shaman 37–38).The battle for RUDOLFO ANAYA’S SONNY BACA SERIES

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Sonny’s grandmothers marches us through key figures and moments of New Mexican history: from the Spanish conquest, we move to the Indian Pueblo Revolt of 1680 to Kearney’s 1846 march into Santa Fe and then to a renowned encounter between Elfego Baca and Billy the Kid. As Sonny attempts to counter Raven he must learn from don Eliseo and Lorenza Villa how to control his dreams and master his inner animal spirit, the coyote.5 In the development of the Baca narrative, the multiple ways in which history is rendered a governing discourse in the identification of the Chicana/o subject become clear. This battle over history, as in Corpi and Ramos, is important because it signals a two-theater front in the long-standing battle over Chicana/o identity. First, there is the perennial fear that the dominant canons of history will efface the stories of the marginalized from the historical record. Second, what Anaya and many of his generation see as younger Chicana/os’ waning knowledge of history and cultural practices exacerbates this fear. Anaya worries, then, that assimilation and historical effacement will result in the erasure of the Hispanic and Chicana/o heritage in the United States. In each novel these concerns surface, becoming progressively more pronounced. Consider, for instance, Sonny’s musings about the historical fate of his great-grandfather, Elfego Baca: ‘‘We don’t honor our heroes [. . .]. Chicano heroes have been erased from the white man’s history. Forgotten’’ (Zia 299). Moreover, this history is more than that of remembering individuals; it is history as a living presence, as a communal force for forging community: ‘‘For the sheriff, as well as for other Taoseños steeped in the tea of history, one hundred years was only yesterday. One hundred fifty years was but a sigh in the memory of the people. History did not happen and then go away for the people of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, it festered and grew into the bones, blood and soul. It stayed to inhabit the memory, and so the people learned to accommodate the ghosts of the past. People here lived and breathed history. It was all around them’’ (Shaman 168). Statements like these pervade the series and illustrate its reliance on history as a governing discourse in the formation of the Chicana/o subject. This anxiety over history has much to tell us about the anxiety over post-nationalist identities and the transition that it is imagined to entail. I examine, then, not only the history Anaya re-presents in the Baca series, but what he does with that history. It is not enough to grasp the historical data Anaya collects as so many documents to be memorized. BROWN GUMSHOES

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Rather, I want to underscore that, as in the Foucaultian model of ‘‘history as archaeology,’’ Baca assembles particular statements to construct a historical monument: ‘‘In our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments. In that area where, in the past, history deciphered the traces left by men, it now deploys a mass of elements that have to be grouped, made relevant, placed in relation to one another to form totalities’’ (Foucault, Archaeology 7). Consequently, I do not dig below the surface of certain historical facts or occurrences to render them comprehensible for readers of the Baca series; instead I consider the network of historical documents Anaya pulls together, the ‘‘mass of elements’’ he deploys, in representing Sonny’s battle against evil. The critical imperative, then, is to understand what Anaya does with his presentation of history and how it ramifies into the other operative discourses in the novel. I am especially concerned about what patterns of identification this network of statements makes possible for Chicana/o subjects. In that regard, two passages from Zia Summer offer a relevant point of entry. Late in the novel Sonny meets with the Japanese businessman Akira Morino—as Gloria’s lover, he is a suspect in her murder. Sonny and Morino engage in a discussion of history and colonization, which emblematizes the historical concerns that pervade the series. Responding to Sonny’s assertion that New Mexico is a colonized nation, Morino states, ‘‘All nations are products of colonization. [. . .] A new migration comes and a new culture is layered on the old. Those who remember their past history dream of it as a utopia, but it is not so. As much as I identify with your view, with your history, I also sense the inevitable movement of history. So I see the influx of migrations into this river valley as its strength’’ (300–301). Morino’s position suggests the constructed, fluid nature of history, a history that does not imagine a transparent access to the past to counter the present. By contrast, Sonny is not necessarily concerned with this fluid or palimpsestic model. He just wants to fill in the gaps of the dominant historical record with the history of the Nuevo Mexicana/os, the marginalized. The second passage illustrates the way the discourse of history interacts with other discourses (e.g., folkways and family origins) and with the construction of identity. Ruminating on the migrants who have moved through New Mexico and their impact on the native population, Sonny imagines ‘‘the city [as] an intricately patterned blanket, each color representing different heritages, traditions, languages, folkways, and each struggling to remain distinct, full of pride, history, RUDOLFO ANAYA’S SONNY BACA SERIES

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honor, and family roots. They were clannish, protective, often prejudiced and bigoted. [. . .] At the center they were all struggling for identity’’ (Zia 211–212; emphasis mine). While easily overlooked if one is simply reading for the historical monuments that erect themselves in the series, these two passages capture the general trend of the historical project at play in Anaya’s series—a meditation on history as discourse and the shaping force of history on identity. Questioning Anaya’s narrative choices in writing the Baca series allows for a better understanding of how the discourse of history operates as so many statements come together to construct a particular identity for Sonny and a history for Chicana/os in New Mexico. In opposition to the novel’s desire to identify the true origins of Nuevo Mexicana/os, such questioning demonstrates that history is a construct designed to locate, organize, assemble, and structure a series of statements that renders material particular events from the past. Seemingly simple questions bring this process to the fore: why does Anaya go back to the clash between the Spanish conquistadors and the Aztecs in relating Sonny’s life story? Why make Sonny the great-grandson of Elfego Baca? Why not locate the source of Chicana/o identity in the Movement? Why so little discussion of Reies López Tijerina? Why the lengthy journey from Cabeza de Baca to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 to Kearney’s march on Santa Fe to the encounter between Elfego Baca and Billy the Kid? There are concrete answers to each of these questions, and if we turn to the novels to answer them we are told that one needs to remember history in order to defend oneself against the onslaught of the present. Or, as don Eliseo warns Sonny, ‘‘Lose the language, the threads of history, and the traditions, and the ways of your ancestors will disappear from the earth of la Nueva México’’ (Shaman 190). I do not take issue with any of the history deployed in the series; I want to emphasize the narrative choices Anaya exercises in depicting the battle between Sonny and Raven. Making those decisions manifest avoids the easy pitfall that the novel sets up of history as an unearthing of originary moments that speak the truth about Chicana/o identity in a continuous, transparent, and necessary way.That is, Anaya tells a particular story of New Mexico, and readers should understand it as such. This point ties directly into the argument I make about modes of identification through which the subject passes. History is a narrative about beginnings (conscious decisions about where one starts) as opposed to origins (fundamental, principal moments that need only be unearthed

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to get to the subject’s ‘‘true meaning’’). Edward Said eloquently differentiates beginnings from origins. He asserts ‘‘that beginnings are first and important but not always evident, that beginning is basically an activity which ultimately implies return and repetition rather than simple linear accomplishment, that beginning and beginning-again are historical whereas origins are divine, that a beginning not only creates but is its own method because it has intention’’ (Beginnings xiii). While at first blush it may appear that Anaya is merely tracking the origins of New Mexican history and identity, he, like a historian, chooses a beginning point and certain repetitions to develop his New Mexican history. He does not return, and cannot return, to a divine originary story for New Mexico. Those ‘‘creative,’’ as opposed to ‘‘divine,’’ moments in Anaya’s narrative reveal what history Anaya finds important for Sonny and the concomitant narrative that that relates about Chicana/o identity. Baca is seemingly aware of these creative choices in the writing of history, as the narrative repeatedly tells us that history is written by the victors (Shaman 46, 51, 138–142, 280), but at the same time he also seems to believe in a true history, a divine origin, that would reveal itself if we could only dig deep enough below the surface discourses of history: ‘‘Our nature is linked to that of our ancestors, to their beliefs. The surface changes for us, but we know that beneath the surface lies the true world, the world of spirits’’ (Rio 121). Don Eliseo explains the former desire of Mexicans to measure time back to its beginning: ‘‘If they could arrive at the beginning of time, they would know the name of God. Perhaps they would see the face of God, the universe being born. Then the memory of the soul would become clear to them. Then life and its suffering would be attached to the dream, to la memoria. It is fragmented now, you see. Too many realities. But we know they are all one, so we have been seeking that unity since we could first dream’’ (Shaman 137–138). These quotes illustrate why Baca wants to go back to the clash between the Aztecs and the Spaniards: he would like us to situate it as the originary moment that will help consolidate and fortify a Chicana/o identity in demise. It is the site from which the colonization of the Americas began, and thus it bears directly, not incidentally, on Chicana/o identification. The Baca series implies that the current domination of Nuevo Mexicana/os is yet another dot on the timeline of this history of conquest. This is precisely why, when Raven seeks to

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erase Sonny from history, he goes back not to some seventeenth-, eighteenth-, or nineteenth-century phenomenon, but begins with the Spaniards’ sixteenth-century conquest of Mexico. See, for instance, the litany of sixteenth-century dates of Spanish imperialism in Shaman Winter (49–51). A great deal of Chicana/o rhetoric similarly invokes the arrival of the Spanish in the Americas as a signal moment in the formation of a Chicana/o identity. The distinctive difference is that Chicana/os outside of New Mexico typically refer to this moment as one when European gachupines spoiled their indigenous ancestry. This sense of contamination is captured best in that Mexican nationalist grito, ‘‘Somos hijos de la chingada.’’ The cry marks the conceptualization of the Mexican race as the product of violation, of rape. The raped one is Malintzin Tenepal, the indigenous woman who, according to nationalists, willingly assisted Cortés in his conquest of Mexico.6 This rhetoric of abjection and rejection informs many Chicana/os’ relation to their Spanish ancestry. In New Mexico, however, Spain takes on a different significance, one that has been a point of contention for Mexican Americans living outside the region. As Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and David Maciel note, one must understand the history of New Mexico, its interest in Anglo American immigration in the nineteenth century, and its push for statehood to best understand New Mexicans’ performance of their Spanish identities and their rejection of a colonial Mexican identity. In addition, GonzalesBerry and Maciel are careful to recognize that a unique mestizo heritage exists for numerous Nuevo Mexicana/os, but it does not apply to all of them. Indeed, there are many New Mexicans who can trace their family genealogies solely through Spanish roots, and often a class/caste ideology is at play in New Mexicans’ desires to identify as Spanish (5– 7). Consider, for instance, Sonny’s explanation for why Frank Dominic married Sonny’s cousin Gloria. He not only needed her connections to become mayor of the city, ‘‘he also wanted to be the new duke of Alburquerque. He yearned to be connected to royalty, anything that had to do with the Spanish blue blood of the first conquistadores. The names of de Vargas and Oñate were heroic in his mind, they were the Españoles who led the colonization of New Mexico, northern New Spain’’ (Zia 13–14). Frank Dominic’s identificatory tendencies exemplify the class/caste distinction of which Gonzales-Berry and Maciel speak.7 Further, in historicizing the links between New Mexicans and Mexi-

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can Americans residing in other geographical areas, Gonzales-Berry and Maciel capture the complexity of New Mexican identities: The term Chicano, popularized in the 1960s and 1970s, exploded the conceit and cleared a path for linking Nuevomexicanos to their kin in California, Texas, Illinois, and elsewhere, but it failed to take root in the arid landscape of Nuevo México. In more recent times, the more popular term, Hispanic, coin of the governmental realm, has gradually replaced the entrenched preference for the label Spanish American. Its Spanish version, Hispano—used primarily by the elite class in the past—is rapidly displacing Mexicano. For this text, we have used numerous identity labels—Nuevomexicano, Chicano, Mexican American, Mexicano, and Hispano—interchangeably, but we have favored the term Nuevomexicano. When all is said and done, this is the label that best identifies a culture and a people whose roots reach deep into the brown earth of their homeland and across its cultural borderlands. (7)

Gonzales-Berry and Maciel’s astute observations capture the complexity of New Mexican identities and underscore why the Cabeza de Vaca starting point remains crucial for Baca’s understanding of his own identity. The tension in Anaya’s series remains, however, because Baca territorializes a general Chicana/o identity on his own personal formation. His attempts to imagine himself as the metonym for Chicana/o identities render the governing historical discourses of the series problematic, for these interwoven discourses, through which a highly complex set of Chicana/o identities form, are reduced to the consolidation of one Chicano’s Bildung, namely Sonny’s. This tension surfaces most explicitly in Rio Grande Fall. In response to a character’s comment that ‘‘I like New Mexico. [. . .] The manitos are a little weird, you know, very Spanish, pero buena gente,’’ Sonny asserts, ‘‘The raza’s pretty much the same all over’’ (196). Given the context of the conversation, I take Sonny’s reply not to mean all over New Mexico (though that would be confounding enough), but all over in general. I highlight this exchange as a signal tension because it speaks specifically to that monolithic, essentializing tendency to render all Chicana/os the same, thereby missing the specificity of Sonny’s own identity and its articulation to the unique, historically specific, New Mexican discourses that underwrite it. Sonny’s essentializing response and the manner in which he is figured as a metonym for the new Chicana/o in touch with the ways of his/her ancestors illustrate a curious gap between the statements that

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actualize the discursive formations of history and race in the series. On one hand, there are the essentializing ideas of identification, but on the other, Baca unequivocally recognizes the heterogeneous racial formations in New Mexico. Rather than try to create some interpretive unity from these gaps, I want to examine the way they create lines of dispersion, lines of flight 8 out of a unified sense of identity, away from the idea that ‘‘the raza’s pretty much the same all over.’’ Bear in mind as well that Anaya’s seasonal quartet, of which the Baca series is a part, begins with Alburquerque, a narrative whose express purpose is to locate the biological father of Abrán González, the protagonist, so he can figure out his race and thereby supposedly know his identity. Identity and identification, that is, are exclusively racially coded: ‘‘He [Abrán] was fair-skinned, so he learned to smile when the old people in the barrio called him güerito, and he learned to fight when the dark-skinned Mexican kids made fun of him. ‘You’re not Mexican, güero,’ they teased, and that barb hurt more than anything’’ (21). This racial tension foregrounds the differences between an essentialized, monolithic racial identity and a more fluid, heterogeneous one and highlights the complications of recognizing the hybridity of one’s identity rather than concealing it beneath a cloak of authenticity.Wrestling with Abrán’s sense of self, Anaya writes, ‘‘There were others like him, Chicanos who had one parent who was Anglo or Black or Asian. The new mestizos. They would have to find their identity, as he was trying to find his’’ (193). This struggle with the complexity of Chicana/o identities, which has for too long been avoided, makes Alburquerque an interesting novel. Moreover, unlike Sonny, Abrán is not turned into the Chicano Everyman. He never takes on metonymic status as the figure for the new generation. Even so, after Abrán wins his prize fight against Bo Decker the narrative tends in that direction: ‘‘A hero had been born, a kid out of the barrio had beaten a fighter with a reputation. That’s what the people wanted, a hero. Someone who came out of their own background to make something of himself’’ (284). That desire to locate a hero takes over the remainder of the series as it gets territorialized on Sonny Baca coming into his identity. The racial complexities present in Alburquerque do surface in the Baca series, but they are manifested in a competition between essentialism and provisionality. The history of New Mexico—its Spanish past, its indigenous customs and history, its conquest by the United States—sets forth a series of events that Baca assembles into a particular narrative of New Mexico BROWN GUMSHOES

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that renders his identity possible and speaks to the racial heterogeneity of the region. In locating his own racial identity, Sonny recalls what he thought when a ‘‘gringa’’ once remarked that he was ‘‘tan all over’’: The Nuevo Mexicanos had been in the Río Grande for centuries, so Indian blood flowed in their veins. And lots of other genes, Sonny thought. Not only the history of Spain but the history of the Nile was his inheritance. In the summer when he tanned dark from swimming, some of his friends said he looked Arabic. Maybe he had a drop of Jewish blood, too, the legacy of the crypto Jews who came to New Mexico with the Oñate expedition centuries before. The Marranos, the Catholics called them. He probably also carried French-Canadian trapper blood, German merchant blood, Navajo, Apache, you name it. The Río Grande was the center of a trading route. Here a grand mestizo mixture took place. The Nile of the desert Southwest. All bloods ran as one in the coyotes of Nuevo Mexico. (Zia 5–6)

Sonny taps into a centuries-long debate on the existence of races. His remarks manifest a strong belief in hypodescent, the one-drop-of-blood rule that in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States made anyone black who had one drop of black blood in his/her veins. The paradox that should have toppled this racialization was that having one drop of white blood did not make one white. Recognition of that paradox would have undone the racial hierarchies hypodescent laws were meant to establish. Moreover, Sonny never uses the label ‘‘Chicano’’ in the above passage. He clearly believes he is describing a situation peculiar to New Mexico, and in the many economic and historical events he draws on to explain this mestizaje, he does explain a uniquely New Mexican identity. But even in New Mexico, as Gonzales-Berry and Maciel point out, that identity pattern is not always the same, nor should one expect it to be, given the demographics and marriage patterns in the state. Yet after several sentences detailing his own complex racial identity, Sonny magically concludes, ‘‘All bloods ran as one in the coyotes of Nuevo Mexico.’’ The gaps between the historical and racial discourses cannot be hidden. The curious aspect is how Sonny can come back to this unified sense of racial identity given the complex historical understanding of the settlement of New Mexico he sets forth throughout the series—and why he would want to. But again, I do not want to flatten these complexities out into my own interpretive unity, for it is much more intellectually compelling to leave these tensions as lines of flight that reveal the complex history of identification for Mexican RUDOLFO ANAYA’S SONNY BACA SERIES

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Americans, which, I argue, comes to the fore in the post-nationalist moment. In this regard, the most interesting minor figure in Shaman Winter is Cyber, the youth who helps Sonny hack into the Sandia Lab files so he can catch Raven. Cyber only passes through the narrative very briefly, but like Sonny he is engaged in a genealogical quest. His is a quest to find his father, who disappeared from Sandia Labs. But Cyber’s exploration of his family roots, unlike Sonny’s, is not an attempt to trace his ancestry back to 1598, that crucial year of Spanish conquest in New Mexico. In the diagram of ‘‘Sonny’s Genealogy’’ that Anaya provides (Shaman 234), Sonny’s lineage goes back to 1598 and Andres Vaca, an assistant to Juan de Oñate and Owl Woman. It then covers roughly four centuries of key Hispano and Indio figures in New Mexican history. By contrast we have Cyber, who says, ‘‘My dad’s Chen. He’s Chinese from Shanghai, so he’s not listed in the Mormon file [the genealogical database Cyber uses to conduct his research]. But they have my mother’s family name in there. We’re Navajo. Diné. My great-grandfather had married a Mexican lady from Seboyeta. That was in the eighteen forties. So I’m part Navajo, part Mexican, part Chinese’’ (Shaman 271). I contrast the two lineages not to extol one family history over the other, but to show the complex racial realities of New Mexico. The history that goes back to the Spanish conquest, however, typically gets privileged, and to the extent that Sonny is the savior figure of the narrative, it is the prized history. As Sonny takes over as the spiritual leader when don Eliseo dies at the end of Shaman Winter, his memories and hopes will become the dominant ones. The novel’s concluding dialogue between Sonny and Rita (his lover) points us in this direction: ‘‘You are lovely, amor,’’ Sonny replied. ‘‘There’s hope.’’ ‘‘Amor y esperanza. And a new dream.’’ He looked into her eyes, and she saw the wisdom that had settled into his soul. She drew him to her and whispered, ‘‘Yes a new dream.’’ (374)

Sonny is the new hero, the new hope. In itself that is fine. Indeed, we expect from traditional detective stories a sense of resolution at novel’s end, if not a pointing toward a new age. To that extent, the series concludes in much the same way that Corpi ends Cactus Blood. The maudlin overtones and nostalgia that Corpi evokes at the end of that novel are checked, however, by the prevalent ambivalence that BROWN GUMSHOES

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emerges in Black Widow’s Wardrobe. With the Baca series, there is no check. This is the telos toward which the series has been building—the realization of Sonny’s identity and his ascendancy to a leadership role. In opposition to this emplotment, I read Cyber as the real line of flight from a set of power relations that are overdetermined in Sonny’s rendering of the history and racial formation of New Mexico. Cyber represents dynamism and flow. Sonny is stasis and false unity. The temptation to argue that the line about all blood running as one in the coyotes of New Mexico marks an early moment in the series, a moment in which Sonny is still coming into his own self-awareness, is undercut by the fact that in Shaman Winter, the final novel of the series, we get an almost verbatim reassertion of New Mexico as a unique site for the development of mestizaje (227). Thus the series does not show Sonny grasping a better historical understanding of the racial formations in New Mexico. Rather, it evidences a gap between these complex formations and Sonny’s at times essentializing ideas about the identity of ‘‘la raza.’’ Surrounded by complex racial formations, Sonny too often takes racial identity as a given, rather than a process. His quest is to master the ways of the ancestors so that he can become a ‘‘señor de la luz,’’ a man better prepared to empower la raza through a spiritual rebirth. RELATIONS OF FORCE, RELATIONS OF THE SOUL: THE BATTLE OF GOOD AND EVIL

Running collateral to the racial and historical discourses in the novel are the discourses of spiritualism and development. Seeking to become a señor de la luz, Sonny learns spiritual practices that will better prepare him to ward off the encroachment of the gente dorada. Ultimately, Anaya constructs an elaborate mythology for surviving in the world, and in creating that mythology he weaves a tapestry of spiritual beliefs that draws on Catholicism as well as indigenous spiritual practices. These religious discourses resonate well with the role of history, for they represent a way to preserve the memories Sonny and the viejitos consider vital to the health of a New Mexican identity. Consequently, in the practices Sonny takes up one can better understand the specificity of his identity; the role of memory as exterior to the subject, as a series of statements lodged in the belly of the earth; and the collective consciousness that don Eliseo imagines unites the world and all souls. Moreover, all of these spiritual practices are conveyed as a recuperaRUDOLFO ANAYA’S SONNY BACA SERIES

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tion of la raza and a safety shield against the commercial ways brought in by the migrants from California’s computer industry. Even though the whole series is territorialized on Sonny’s identification process, it is in the discourse of the spiritual that the narrative offers a collective will, a communal spirit. Whereas Bless Me, Ultima offered a syncretic spiritual practice to make sense of the tumultuous changes in 1940s New Mexico and thereby spoke to the cultural nationalist tendencies of the Movement, the Baca series shifts to an even grander elaboration of a spiritual mythology to attend to a new set of shifting socioeconomic practices peculiar to late capitalism. But even as this shift occurs, the series’s cultural solutions are still located in that cultural nationalist register of the Movement. The conditions and circumstances of daily life have changed, but the strategies for dealing with them seem locked in the past, as if they were universal truths for all times. An operative question to keep in mind, then, is this: is the governance of the subject through the spiritualism attractive because it moves the struggle to the metaphysical realm and thereby eschews the constraints of the physical world? Fighting ‘‘Evil’’ (Raven) in the metaphysical realm, even if the fight is articulated to specific historical events, as in Shaman Winter, becomes a winnable battle precisely because the ‘‘enemy’’ is locatable, definable. Not unlike much traditional detective fiction, such a battle presents a binarized set of power relations where the lines are clearly drawn and knowable; there is no ambiguity about the fact that Raven is evil and Sonny is good. Contrast this to the physical realm that surrounds Sonny, where power is much more diffuse. Consider the history of the land-grants struggles in New Mexico: these battles have been largely unwinnable precisely because the relations of force they represent are much more complicated than those limned in a metaphysical (one might even say hypothetical) struggle between good and evil. Similarly, by the logic of the Baca series, it is easier for Sonny to do battle against Raven and for the reader to cheer for a hero than it is to understand the complex set of relations that undergird the commercialization and urban development represented in the novel. In other words, while the novels represent the attendant social problems of a rapidly developing urban sector, they cannot pinpoint a clear enemy such as Raven within this scenario. Examining the discourse of spirituality in the novel means also attending to the relations of force that develop

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between it and the discourse of development. Baca poses the one as a response to or evasion of the other. Perhaps I might begin by thinking about the way the elders in the novel, especially don Eliseo, construct the earth as a repository for memory, for the memory they seek to preserve is one of a New Mexico prior to urban development and the encroachment of perceived outsiders. In contrast to the function of memory in the Damasco series, in the Baca series memory operates as exterior to the subject, as a repository to be unearthed. In the Damasco series there was a sense of memory as the product of the subjects who created it and brought it to life in the very act of remembering, as with the Chicana/o Moratorium, the death of Rubén Salazar, and the Delano grape workers’ strike. And certainly there is that sense in the Baca series as well, with the historical data on the Spanish conquest of the Americas, Elfego Baca, and the genocide committed against Native Americans. At the same time though, memory functions as something exterior to the subject that can be unearthed through the spiritual practices of the elders. The running narrative of don Eliseo’s dying cottonwood tree in Zia Summer serves as a prime exemplar of memory as located in the earth, in nature. Simultaneously, the tree’s death is an allegory for the death of the indigenous New Mexicans and their old ways as a result of encroaching urban development. As trees are cleared to develop property for California’s computer industry migrants, the narrator observes, ‘‘The old southwest was dead, or dying, taken over by the Californicators living the Santa Fe style and staying in touch through fax machines’’ (222). And the opening line of Zia Summer describes the buzz of chainsaws waking Sonny as don Eliseo’s grandson prepares to take down the dying cottonwood, which is later anthropomorphized so that it resembles a resisting subject in a battle for its life: ‘‘The tough bark of the tree had kicked the chain off the bar of the saw [. . .]’’ (5). Slightly later, as an explanation of why the tree is dying, the narrator muses, ‘‘Maybe it was sadness killing the tree, sadness as huge expensive homes covered the once fertile fields of Ranchitos’’ (74). The human characteristics attributed to the tree evidence the attempts to make it a repository of memory and an agent of history. In addition, consider the ways in which the tree is described as a marker of history, a living memory of the old ways: ‘‘It had been witness to the last hundred years of history in the village of Los Ranchitos in the North Valley of Alburquerque’’ (4). Then there is don Eliseo’s ex-

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tended soliloquy on the relevance of the trees to the history and gente of New Mexico: ‘‘I grew up under this tree,’’ don Eliseo sighed. ‘‘It’s been in the family since my family settled here in Ranchitos. Sanamagon, there’s been Romeros here since before the Indians kicked out all the Españoles in 1680. Before Alburquerque was made a villa in 1706, the Romeros were already raising corn here. There were trees, an alameda of alamos. The raices, Sonny, beneath the earth the roots of all these trees stretch far, connecting to other trees, until the entire valley is connected. You can’t kill a tree and not kill the past. The trees are like the gente of the valley, sooner or later we’re all related. Primos, Sonny, primos from the first people who came to the valley. Our raices stretch into the past.’’ (74–75)

Eliseo’s monologue continues in this vein for another paragraph and concludes with the rhetorical question: ‘‘How can I cut down my history?’’ (75). Thus, in the initial novel, Anaya sets in place the founding cosmology that runs through the series and that underwrites the relations of force between spiritualism and development. The very need to get in touch with and preserve the memories stored in the earth is presumably to ward off evil, though ultimately the responses to the encroaching development are only local, never systemic. That Sonny learns and preserves the ways of the elders only helps him battle Raven. His acquired skills do not cut across the metaphysical plane to the physical realm. Sonny can find his cousin’s murderer in Zia Summer and stop the terrorist attack on the nuclear waste truck; he can foil Raven’s efforts to exchange drug-running money for nuclear arms in Rio Grande Fall; and he can even preserve his own history and constrain Raven in Shaman Winter, but these battles really carry no material force outside of Sonny’s quest to ascend to the level of señor de la luz. Nevertheless, the narrative asks the reader to believe that Sonny’s metaphysical victory against evil represents a solution to the real threats faced by Nuevo Mexicana/os on a daily basis—heroin addiction, alcoholism, nuclear poisoning, homelessness, and poverty, to name only a few. Indeed, the series strikes a defeatist posture toward the tireless development of New Mexico and the displacement of its native inhabitants. This speaks volumes to the conception of power in the series and why Anaya presents the homologous unfolding of a narrative of spirituality and a trajectory of seemingly unstoppable commercialization. In the metaphysical realm, it is possible, and perhaps even comforting, to speak in such grand and nebulous terms as good and evil. In the maBROWN GUMSHOES

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terial world, that is a much more difficult practice. Power relations do not break down that neatly. Our world is not the world of the old westerns, where the good guys and bad guys are demarcated by the color of their hats. Moreover, asking concrete questions about relations of force and strategies of resistance gives lie to the idea of essentialized identity politics. People cannot be assumed to be political allies because of the color of their skin or their surnames. As Gonzales-Berry and Maciel point out, even party politics in New Mexico are more complicated than that. Whereas it is often assumed that the ‘‘Hispanic,’’ and most certainly the Mexican American, vote goes to Democrats, there are strong Republican ties among Nuevo Mexicana/os, a condition unique to New Mexico (2). Power and politics are much more complicated and diffuse in the physical world than in the battle portrayed between Raven and Sonny. That the commercial development of New Mexico continues unchecked throughout the series belies the larger belief represented by Sonny that the struggle, in the final analysis, is a spiritual one. As Sonny’s spiritual guide, Lorenza, suggests: ‘‘The struggle has always been between a harmonious universe and one which collapses into complete chaos. Put another way, it’s the struggle between good and evil. All resides in our souls, so the energy of evil brujos works to defeat us’’ (Rio 124). In a certain sense, we are back to where I began this chapter. There are multiple forms of governance, but they are all ultimately immanent to the State. Sonny may very well learn how to govern his soul, and that may even be suggestive of a future pattern of self-governance in New Mexico, but this governance of the self does not happen in a vacuum. It does not permit the subject to escape the relations of force that are shot through the State. Real estate taxes are going up and this will continue to displace old New Mexican farming families, as the series repeatedly reminds us, and the governance of the self can really do nothing to stop this. How then does Anaya’s series fit into the larger arguments about the identification processes of the post-nationalist subject? What do the four central discourses I have traced—history, race, spiritualism, and development—tell us about the Baca series and Chicana/o subjectivity? A series tapped deeply into the history of New Mexico and recent economic shifts, curiously, gives us a rather static rendering of the Chicana/o subject. The series offers a protagonist who, notwithstanding his cognizance of the contemporary moment, retreats back to a syncretic spiritualism to govern himself and ward off the evils of the present moment. There is a nostalgic attempt to locate the origin of RUDOLFO ANAYA’S SONNY BACA SERIES

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Chicana/o and Nuevo Mexicana/o identity as if that origin were clear and transparent and one only need assemble the proper genealogy to lift the curtain that conceals it. An author long considered a herald of cultural nationalism, Anaya locks his contemporary protagonist, Sonny Baca, in the past with the heroes of his earlier novels. The Baca series represents a moment of stasis in a sea of change, but it also reminds us that cultural identities are always plural, never singular and monolithic. Thus, even though we have moved into a post-nationalist moment in which new Chicana/o identities emerge and are rearticulated, there are still residual moments from the past operating in the present. Baca is one such residual element, but his location in that past offers us a chance to look at how history operates, how, that is, one builds a series of statements about a particular formation into an articulable discourse.

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conclusion

LOOKING BACK, POINTING FORWARD

Detective novels typically end with the mystery solved and a conclusion reached. At the end of my study of the Chicana/o detective novel, I find myself wanting a similar resolution, a conclusion that ties matters up. Yet, if Brown Gumshoes has taught anything, it is that these novels and the identities therein are as much about openness as about conclusion. They show that the world is indeed knowable but also that knowing means learning the open-endedness of identity, a sense of self in flux, ever-becoming, not concluding. To impose, then, a tidy summation that presents identity matters as finally determined and pinned down would be a mistake. Rather I would like to use these remaining pages to reflect briefly on the ground Brown Gumshoes has covered and to meditate on the applicability of my model of post-nationalist identities for other Latina/o writers of detective fiction who are not Chicana/o. There can be no doubt that one reads detective novels, in part, for pleasure. These novels also serve, however, as a significant index of the social, political, and historical features of a culture. As I have argued in the preceding chapters, the Chicana/o detective novel registers the changing identity formations of Chicana/os over the last two decades. Its coincident emergence with and flourishing during the postnationalist moment makes it a timely and unique means of identifying and chronicling the key changes since the nationalist moment of the 1960s and 1970s. Most certainly, Chicana and Chicano writers working in other genres, too, have tapped into these shifting identity patterns. Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Ana Castillo, Alfredo Vea Jr., Denise Chávez, and Michelle Serros, to name only a few, are all writers who explore Chicana/o culture and identity in their post-nationalist mo-

dalities.1 It is, however, the generic features of the detective novel—an alienated way of seeing, a foregrounded and overlapping emphasis on ways of knowing and ways of being, and a signal focus on identity— that make it a rich and unique genre for systematically exploring identity formations. The post-nationalist ruminations of writers working in other genres complement rather than undercut my argument that beginning in the 1980s Chicana/os began thinking about identity not as a nationalist solidarity of sameness, but as a post-nationalist dynamic of difference. Consistent with a boom in women’s detective fiction and ethnic detectives in general, which have been well studied, Chicana/o detective novels form a corpus of important writing that has much to tell us about Chicana/o identities and post-nationalism, especially as these relate to issues of gender, sexuality, familia, home, race, spirituality, and transborder relations. I want to emphasize as well that when I speak of nationalism and post-nationalism, I am addressing culturally dominant trends. Certainly during the nationalist period Chicana/os grappled with gender and sexuality, for instance, but the dominant trend was to repress or curtail those discussions for the sake of la causa. By contrast, the dominant trend since the 1980s has been to interrogate the unified subject and attempt to understand it in all its complexities and multiplicities, and that is precisely what comes to the fore in the detective novels of Rolando Hinojosa, Michael Nava, Lucha Corpi, Manuel Ramos, and Rudolfo Anaya. They conjoin the alienated outsider position of the typical detective to Chicana/o subjects who often find themselves grappling with alienation both within and outside the Chicana/o community. This conjunction provides an apt vantage point from which to assess the contemporary Chicana/o subject. As early examples of Chicano detective fiction, Rolando Hinojosa’s police procedurals lay the critical groundwork for understanding the shifting terrain of the nation-state and border relations in a world of late capitalism. In this moment one sees the full-blown effects of advanced economic relations on social ones, where, in the logic of Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series, the artificial drug economy has cast a pall over the interactions among his Klail Citians. Partners in Crime and Ask a Policeman paint a new national model that is shot through with corruption. They narrate a world that is, yes, knowable, but ultimately uncontainable. Indeed, the very genre in which Hinojosa writes, the police procedural, with its emphasis on multiple crimes and detectives BROWN GUMSHOES

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working on numerous fronts to fight the criminal element, is, of all the mystery genres, the most appropriate one to create a sense of pervasive corruption and reason reduced to instrumental rationality. Yet even within these generic conventions, Hinojosa amplifies and emphasizes the sense of imminent violence in the Valley, and he articulates this escalating violence to the intensifying economic order of the late twentieth century. These procedurals are the story of the profit motive and how it affects the Chicana/o subject. Hinojosa’s two procedurals sketch the broad historical, cultural, and economic trends of the postnationalist period, and the subsequent writers of the Chicana/o detective novel show more directly the effects of these trends on Chicana/o identity formations. For Nava the detective novel becomes a meditation on Chicano homosexuality and family. Given the repression of sexual identities within the Chicana/o community and during the Movement, Nava’s Henry Rios series offers a valuable opportunity to queer Chicana/o identity. While Cherríe Moraga, Carla Trujillo, and Gloria Anzaldúa, among others, initiated an important conversation about Chicana lesbianism as early as the 1980s, the conversation about male homosexuality among Chicanos has been slower to take hold. Thus Henry Rios provides a valuable opportunity to think about the identity formation of the gay Chicano male. More specifically, in writing the gay Chicano into the detective corpus, Nava helps us imagine new possibilities for constructing familia, possibilities that would open up the family structure beyond heteronormative standards and acknowledge rather than conceal, affirm rather than denigrate homosexuality. The type of familia that the Rios series ultimately imagines escapes the poverty of imagination that blinkers too many discussions about the power of family and that assumes without investigating that the family is an enabling structure free from the tyrannies of the wicked world. Rios illustrates the constraints of family as well as ways to reimagine it. In the Gloria Damasco and Luis Montez series, two one-time nationalists must work through their connections to the past in order to give their lives in the present meaning. These investigations of the Movement and the significance, or lack thereof, of nationalism in postnationalist times bifurcate along lines of feminist inquiry and masculinism. Gloria Damasco, that is, finds her investigations in the late twentieth century bringing her back to prior historical moments—the Chicano Moratorium, the Delano grape strike, and the Spanish conquest of the Americas—to investigate her own feminist concerns and to CONCLUSION

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illustrate the dynamism and flux of history as it shapes lives. Contrary to earlier Chicana/o attempts to transparently dip into the past, Corpi shows that the past is not an ossified terrain into which one can simply dig to find one’s roots. Holding onto past identities and trying to import them into the present leaves Gloria wondering about her feminist and nationalist inclinations. Her ambivalence over those prior positionings is foregrounded when her means to know are undermined. Consider, for instance, those times when communication literally breaks down in her novels, as when the earthquake at the end of Cactus Blood cuts off radio transmissions or when Carlota’s neurological disorder eats away her memories. Moments like these, with which the novels are replete, highlight the connection between ways of knowing and ways of being, teaching Gloria that the causal chain she can put together to solve a given mystery is not so readily established when one considers the historical contours of identity formations. Similarly, Luis Montez learns that the nationalism and carnalismo that once gave his life meaning are disappearing vestiges of a bygone moment. Both he and Gloria find themselves alienated from the postnationalism of the present as they try to live through outmoded scripts from the past. This heralds an existential crisis for Luis, because the Montez series charts a trajectory from self-questioning to fear of obsolescence and, ultimately, fear of disappearance. In other words, Luis’s identity is etched in a shopworn masculinism that disrupts his sense of self as a lawyer and a man. The very scripts that once gave his life meaning and momentum are dramas that are no longer part of the repertoire of Chicana/o theater. Each mystery shows him either wrestling with past moments from the sixties and seventies, such as the murder of Rocky Ruiz and the disappearance of Oscar Zeta Acosta, or facing deracinated Chicana/o youth who no longer understand their cultural history, and by extension, then, the significance of one-time Chicana/o ‘‘barrio warriors’’ like himself. In this sea of dynamism and change Rudolfo Anaya’s Sonny Baca series represents a moment of stasis. Well aware of the changing world around him, Sonny retreats to the past to learn the ways of the señores and señoras de la luz. While remembering history and cultural traditions is vital to understanding one’s present self, the past for Sonny becomes an archive into which he can supposedly reach without complications. History is transparent and accessed as if by will. In so doing, Anaya casts the self as governed not by the State but by the discourse of spiritualism prevalent in New Mexico, a discourse articulated to BROWN GUMSHOES

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race, history, and urban development. These discourses never become vibrant spheres of flux and dynamism; rather they bog down in a static metaphysical/spiritual battle between good and evil, between Sonny and Raven. The relations of force that define power as multifarious, overlapping, supple, and productive are presented in the Baca series as monolithic and static. Good is good and bad is bad, and learning to tap into one’s nagual (animal spirit) helps one know which is which. Indeed, Anaya’s characters seem reminiscent of his early bestseller, Bless Me, Ultima. But Ultima sought to make sense of a changing New Mexican landscape in the 1940s. The Baca series is set in the 1990s. While history is key to identity, one cannot expect to make sense of the present while frozen in the past. In attempting to overcome his alienation at the hands of a commodifying and developing New Mexico, Sonny chooses not to wrestle through these moments of ambivalence, as Gloria Damasco and Luis Montez do. Rather, he seeks recourse to the past to counter the present, thereby freezing both in unrepresentative temporal spaces. My arguments about an alienated Aztlán both address the identity formations of contemporary Chicana/os and hold some applicability for other Latina/o constituencies as well. As with all umbrella terms— African American, Asian American, Native American, and white—the term Latina/o draws together a group of decidedly different communities under a general ethnic label. Thus, the specificities and differences among Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadoreños, etc. are masked under this supposedly unifying signifier, to say nothing of the differences within any one of these communities. Notwithstanding these differences, I think there are useful points of conjunction to explore in the writings of two other Latina/o authors who have penned detective series—Carolina Garcia-Aguilera and Marcos McPeek Villatoro.2 Their respective series examine issues central to the Latina/o community that are suggestive for future lines of comparative cultural inquiry and perhaps even for imagining possible collaborative political projects. In her essay on African American and Chicano detective fiction, Carmen Flys-Junquera argues similarly that fiction represents ‘‘imaginative strategies for resolving real conflicts and problems in [a given] community’’ (97). A former licensed private detective, Cuban American Carolina Garcia-Aguilera 3 is the author of six Lupe Solano mysteries—Bloody Waters (1996), Bloody Shame (1997), Bloody Secrets (1997), A Miracle in Paradise (1999), Havana Heat (2000), and Bitter Sugar (2001).4 In keepCONCLUSION

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ing with the author’s own Latina heritage, each of the mysteries, set principally in Miami and at times Cuba, deals with hotspot issues in the Cuban American community. This is first seen on the novels’ dedication pages, which all follow the same pattern: Garcia-Aguilera first dedicates the novel to her three daughters, Sarah, Antonia, and Gabriela; the second dedication, though the wording varies, is always about freeing Cuba from its ‘‘nightmare.’’ What I find compelling about the series is that it shows the Cuban American community in a complex light. Though they are set principally in the Southeast, the novels demonstrate that there are also Cuban American communities in other regions of the country and, more significantly, that there are political differences among Cuban Americans. To her credit, Garcia-Aguilera shows that while there are, of course, rabid anti-Castro political positions, Cuban Americans’ political opinions often differ, especially with regard to what they imagine as the ideal relationship between the United States and Cuba.5 Along these lines, her work complements that of anthropologist Ruth Behar, who in the edited collection Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba (1995) brought together artists, critics, and creative writers from both Cuba and the United States to think through the issues that have long divided the two communities and how they might be able to build bridges between the Cuban and Cuban American communities, between the United States and Cuba. Though separated by ninety miles of water, the two nations’ lives are imbricated in one another. As Lupe Solano notes early on in Bloody Waters, the first novel in the series, ‘‘Though my sisters and I were born in Miami and had never been to Cuba, never for a day could we forget the island’s impact on our lives’’ (7). While the Cuban American and Chicana/o communities are typically thought to be dramatically different political entities, there are profitable points of comparison between the Chicana/o detective novels and GarciaAguilera’s, such as this sense of exile from one’s homeland and the tie that still binds that homeland to one’s identity. Lupe Solano is not only a Cuban American detective, she is a Cuban American detective who also works on cases key to the Cuban American community. In so doing, Solano often travels back and forth between Miami and Cuba, albeit illegally. She investigates an illegal adoption ring with ties to young Cuban prostitutes and a Catholic order of nuns in Cuba; two exiled families’ battle over diamonds taken out of Cuba when they fled from Castro; the claims of the Yugoslavian Order of Illumination that the Virgin of Charity is to cry on October 10, BROWN GUMSHOES

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Cuban Independence Day, to signal the reunification of Cubans and Cuban exiles; the theft and rightful ownership of famous Cuban paintings; and the plans of a Spanish investment firm to buy up sugar mills confiscated by Castro and turn them into hotels. A detailed analysis of Garcia-Aguilera’s series is well beyond the scope of this study and combined with the writings of other Latina/o detective writers merits a book-length study of its own, so I will limit myself to a general reflection on Cuban exilic politics and Lupe’s gendered identity. In these two facets are profitable points of comparison to the preceding chapters. Since at least 1848, when the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo redrew the border between the United States and Mexico and left thousands of Mexicans residing in a new country literally overnight, many Mexican Americans have had a fraught relationship with the United States.6 Over the next century and a half, countless racist acts, de jure and de facto, left numerous Chicana/os feeling alienated from their homeland. Cuban Americans, who immigrated to the United States because of Castro’s rise to power, similarly consider themselves in exile from their homeland. Later generations sometimes share these feelings of exile and even resentment; at other times, the younger generations find themselves at odd with their families’ politics. This feeling of loss of home resonates with Chicana/os’ sense of alienation. While there are dramatic historical differences between the emergence and development of the Cuban American and Mexican American communities in the United States, and while U.S. government attitudes toward the two communities vary dramatically—especially vis-à-vis immigration—for Chicana/o writers, the detective novel is a powerful tool for exploring this exilic status. The outsider purchase of the detective, that is, allows Garcia-Aguilera to explore the dual insider and outsider status of Cuban Americans in Miami. Garcia-Aguilera’s presentation of Solano’s Cubanidad and her relation to exile politics is one filled with wonderful contradictions and ambivalences that show both the protagonist’s alliance with and departure from her community. On the one hand, throughout the six volumes in the series Garcia-Aguilera carefully presents Solano as stringently committed to her Cuban roots and her cultural identity. Unlike, say, Corpi and Ramos’s series, these novels do not depict those moments of ambivalence and growth where the characters step back and reappraise the development of their cultural heritage and identities. Though she was born in the United States, Solano presents herself as a committed Cuban. Sometimes this surfaces in the most superfiCONCLUSION

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cial ways, as when Solano reminds the reader that when drinking coffee from her mug she must have the Cuban flag facing her. She notes, ‘‘It was a compulsion I was unable to shake’’ (Miracle 122). Or when she programs her cell phone to play the Cuban national anthem. Her father similarly sets his telephone to play the anthem when he places callers on hold (Secrets 260). Beyond these surface markers, Garcia-Aguilera also connects Solano to her Cuban identity in more meaningful ways, which at times show the fractures in the Cuban American community. Consider, for instance, Lupe’s reflection on her own exilic status: Although I grew up and lived in America, it felt like an accident to me. I was Cuban. When asked where I was from I would say Miami, but in truth my soul was in Cuba. I had lived a full and rich life in Miami, like many other exiles, but I had always felt as though I was in a state of suspended animation—my ‘‘real’’ life would begin as soon as Castro fell from power and I was able to return to the island. But part of me knew it might not be that simple. Cubans were a people divided and fractured by political acrimony. The days of el Grito de Yara, when we were united, were in a distant and almost unimaginable past. (Miracle 45)

Unlike Garcia-Aguilera herself, who belongs to what Cuban sociologist Rubén Rumbaut has identified as the ‘‘1.5 generation’’ (i.e., born in Cuba but raised in the United States),7 Solano does not have that split line of affiliation and national heritage. She claims not a hyphenated identity, but a Cuban one, an identity, as she notes, that resides in her ‘‘soul.’’ In other novels it is in her blood. In either case, Solano ties her identity to the island. Conjoined to this notion of a life in ‘‘suspended animation,’’ however, is significant reflection on the heterogeneity of political viewpoints within the exile community. The community’s views are not as monolithic as they are often presented in the U.S. popular media. While Solano may sound nostalgic over the Grito de Yara (October 10, 1858)—nostalgia probably learned from her father, with whom she has just been discussing this key date in the struggle for Cuban independence—she by no means presents an idealized conception of contemporary life among Cuban Americans. She has the viewpoint of an insider deeply attached to her community, but she can also, like the detached tough guy investigator, see things from a distance, sometimes comfortably and sometimes painfully. Similarly, at times she sides with the more angry exiles and wants to ‘‘screw Castro’’ (Havana 48), describing him as an ‘‘egomaniacal old

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man’’ (Sugar 294). But she is just as capable of critiquing what she sees as rabid, reactionary exile politics, as when she criticizes a right-wing radio talk show: ‘‘I had generally been appalled by what I had heard. [. . .] Anyone willing to even entertain a different point of view than that of the talk-show host was quickly pilloried as a Castro-lover and a Communist’’ (Miracle 102).8 Solano thus moves along a continuum of complex responses to her own exilic status and the politics of her fellow Cuban Americans. She avoids easy answers, and in that regard I see her as a figure consonant with Chicana/o detective writers who examine the dynamics of difference and the polyvalent discourses of cultural identities. In addition, Solano is quick to note that the Cuban American community not only holds divergent beliefs and practices but is also a group for whom ‘‘no love is lost with other Hispanics’’ (Secrets 85). GarciaAguilera is able to focus on the complexities of Cuban identity and politics because of the setting and topics she has chosen for her novels. Lupe Solano lives in Miami, and as such she finds herself among a complex cast of Cubans, Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans, Nicaraguans, and Dominicans, and Garcia-Aguilera does not allow her character to settle into comfortable, unexamined positions about a uniform and harmonious Latinidad. Moreover, as the private detective, the figure who from the outside looks in, Solano maintains that distance from which to look awry. It is against the backdrop of the history of the tough guy private eye, made popular in the United States by writers like Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane, that I want to consider some of the gendered aspects of Solano’s character. In many ways Lupe Solano, like Corpi’s Gloria Damasco, follows in the footsteps of the feminist rewritings of the hard-boiled novel that began in the 1980s. Indeed, I think GarciaAguilera may even be more self-conscious than Corpi of gender constructions in her novels. As Solano quips, ‘‘I had established myself as an independent and successful woman in a notoriously macho field of work’’ (Waters 33). Garcia-Aguilera constructs her hero’s gender to disrupt easy understandings of masculinity and femininity. Not unlike Sarah Paretsky’s portrayal of wisecracking private investigator V. I. Warshawksi, GarciaAguilera presents Solano as concerned about fashion and physical appearance, often in ways that might be deemed hyperfeminine, yet at other times, she masculinizes Solano. Throughout the series Solano

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dexterously performs, or in Judith Butler’s term troubles, her gender to her advantage. Gender is not an ossified category, but one that can be adroitly manipulated. Indeed, the opening paragraph of Havana Heat shows a Lupe Solano well aware of her gender performance: ‘‘I should have been born a man. I think like one, I act like one, I live my life like one. As a private investigator for the last eight years, I’ve worked in a field dominated by men. The men I’ve worked with, as well as the men I’ve been involved with, have always tried to ascertain who is the real Lupe Solano. Eventually they all discover that I have two sides: a gentle, feminine veneer that I display when I need to, and the ruthless heart and soul of a man underneath’’ (1). In other fiction genres such a remark might be unnecessary or even seem heavy-handed, but in a genre that has a long tradition in the United States of masculinism, Garcia-Aguilera can play that gender performance to her advantage. She draws on the genre’s masculinism not to trash it but to refashion it, to show it as a construction that is not biologically determined. The reader once again sees an important facet of identity not as static but as fluid. While one is never fully capable of controlling the perception or construction of oneself, the opening of Havana Heat shows the supple multiplicities of identity. Indeed, I would even argue that being the objectified other in so much detective fiction allows female characters like Lupe Solano, Anna Pigeon, Cordelia Gray, Kate Fansler, and Kinsey Millhone, to name only a few,9 to achieve that alienated stance that allows them to see otherwise. As Maureen T. Reddy observes, ‘‘By removing women from the position of ‘other,’ these novelists open up an enormous range of possibilities for portraying women’’ (Sisters 102). Part of destabilizing these gender boundaries entails not subscribing to preconceived ideas about what is and is not suitable for a woman. Thus, throughout the series Solano makes a great deal of her appreciation of food. In one representative example, Lupe describes a dinner with her love interest, Tommy: ‘‘I had already polished off a burgeoning Caesar salad, half a loaf of homemade bread slathered with butter, and a basket of potato skins. I was on my third glass of Merlot, and working hard on my filet mignon. [. . .] He said I was a refreshing change from the skin-and-bones model types he was used to, the kind of women who ordered a lettuce leaf, with vinegar on the side, as their main course’’ (Shame 183). Preconceived ideas about the male and female appetite would render a similar description about a man’s eating habits beside the point. Indeed, a healthy appetite would not foreground the gender BROWN GUMSHOES

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dimensions of eating for a male character, but abstemious eating habits would attract attention.10 Garcia-Aguilera casts Solano’s assistant and cousin, Leonardo, as the foil to Solano in this regard. He is the body image–obsessed male. Garcia-Aguilera walks a fine line in this portrayal, because she often articulates Leonardo’s outlandish sartorial expression and fastidious gym and health routines to his ambiguous sexuality: in Havana Heat, worried that he might ‘‘freak out’’ one of her conservative clients, Solano let out a sigh of relief when she saw that ‘‘he was dressed in black bicycle pants—to the knee, not the hot pants he sometimes wore—along with an oversized white cotton tuxedo shirt that came down to mid-thigh. He completed this ensemble with red Converse All-Star high-tops’’ (19). Repeated references to Leonardo’s attire, conjoined with frequents remarks about his unclear sexual preference, give the reader pause: ‘‘If I had to categorize Leo’s sexual preferences, I would use the word confused. I had never known him to have a relationship with anyone of either gender. Sometimes I wondered if Leo himself knew which sex he preferred’’ (Sugar 104).11 While Garcia-Aguilera may trouble gender constructions with Solano, she comes perilously close to buying into stereotypes that equate flamboyancy with homosexuality in her depiction of Leonardo. I call Leonardo’s character to attention here because he serves as profitable contrast to the construction of Solano, who repeatedly refuses to play into the societal expectation that women must maintain an hourglass figure to be considered beautiful. And finally, I want to highlight Solano’s ambivalence about being physical with other women. More often than not, she makes note of her unease about even the most casual of touches from a woman—being hugged in thanks, in greeting, or in consolation. For instance, when another female character who happens to be pregnant attempts to placate her with a hug, Solano observes, ‘‘To my total astonishment, Barbara waddled over and hugged me. She held me tight, and I smelled tobacco and perfume. I suppose she meant to reassure me, but she scared me silly, and I felt unbearably awkward. It’s always been hard for me to show physical affection to another woman, not to mention one with a gigantic protruding belly’’ (Waters 176). While there are numerous mentions of Solano’s discomfort with touching other women, GarciaAguilera never tries to explain it. It is just one of her character’s traits. It is the way it has ‘‘always been.’’ One never gets the sense that this distance from other women is homophobic. Indeed, Solano carefully points out that she misses having the time to cultivate more female CONCLUSION

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friendships: ‘‘It had been a long time since I’d lingered over lunch with a woman; it made me realize how much I missed female companionship’’ (Havana 176). Since Garcia-Aguilera repeatedly establishes Solano’s distaste for physicality with other women, instances when she becomes more comfortable with it allow the reader to understand her as a character not locked into her gender performance. After the death of her best friend Margarita Vidal, Solano finds herself helping out Margarita’s assistant, Leonora. Surprised by herself, Solano states, ‘‘On impulse, I hugged her [Leonora]. Twice in one day had to be some kind of record for me’’ (Shame 228). In A Miracle in Paradise Solano displays a similar physical expression of emotion with a female character, Sister Rose O’Donnell: ‘‘On impulse, I reached out and kissed her cheek, hugged her briefly. Leonardo looked on in amazement. He knew I didn’t like physical contact with other women. I normally behaved as though they had a contagious disease’’ (233). While Garcia-Aguilera never explains the cause of Solano’s repulsion to physicality with women, in these two examples ‘‘impulse’’ is the rationale for the hugs. They are automatic, unexamined responses. In addition, Leonardo is noted at least once as the cause of Lupe’s increased comfort with women. After hugging another female character, again on ‘‘impulse,’’ the recipient of the hug Marisol Vélez (Solano’s hired surveillance assistant) remarks, ‘‘I think Leonardo is getting to you. You’ve never been touchy-feely before’’ (Shame 218). Again, these hugging incidents stand out not only because Garcia-Aguilera draws attention to them, but also because they work against the masculinist expectations that readers often come to the genre with. Indeed, GarciaAguilera can highlight episodes like these because they play into the ways she is troubling the gender norms not only of her character, but also of the genre itself.12 Indeed, her refusal to take unexamined positions on gender and exile make her an exciting candidate for future comparative work among Latina/o detective writers. While Garcia-Aguilera has established an estimable corpus of detective novels, Marcos McPeek Villatoro is quickly establishing himself as a formidable detective writer, a genre to which he has turned only recently. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, McPeek Villatoro counts among his published works Walking to La Milpa: Living in Guatemala with Armies, Demons, Abrazos, and Death (1996); A Fire in the Earth (1996); They Say That I Am Two: Poems (1997); The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones (1999); and his Romilia Chacón mystery BROWN GUMSHOES

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series. The Chacón series began in 2001 with Arte Público’s publication of Home Killings; in 2003, Justin, Charles and Company brought out the second installment, Minos. Random House has recently purchased the series and will reissue the first two novels in mass-market paperback in addition to publishing the next two novels, which are already under way.13 One of the significant differences between the Romilia Chacón series and the other Latina/o detective series is its geographic setting. Though Minos moves Chacón around the map among a number of United States cities—Atlanta, New Orleans, Denver, and Los Angeles —the principal setting for both Home Killings and Minos is Nashville, Tennessee. For those who study Latina/o demographics this southern setting will come as no surprise. The dispersal of the Latina/o population in the United States receives a more sinister presentation in the popular media, however, where it is often presented as a veritable ‘‘Hispanic panic’’ (i.e., the fear of Latina/o immigrants taking over the United States)14 and has been the topic of much news conversation. The Latina/o immigrant and migrant populations are usually presented in one of two reductive ways: one, they are never geographically positioned but rather represented as a nebulous body flooding ‘‘our’’ shores; or two, they are circumscribed to the typical homelands—Florida, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California, and New York. These presentations reduce Latina/os’ long history in the United States to a recent phenomenon, and for many non-Latina/os this distortion fosters a sense of nativism and xenophobia. In his Chacón series, McPeek Villatoro, of Salvadoran and Tennessean heritage himself, gives a more complex and nuanced portrayal of the diverse and dispersed Latina/o community. In a recent study of Latina/o culture, Juan Flores argues for a Latina/o studies that understands the shifting demographics of Latina/o communities and how these communities come together in diverse locations, often because of market forces.15 The Chacón series begins such an inquiry. Though the Chácons came to the United States fleeing the death squads in El Salvador, Romilia points out that many Latinos were brought to Nashville to do agricultural and construction work. As these laboring populations increased, the businesses needed to support a growing Latina/o community encouraged other family members to immigrate: ‘‘The necessary equipment for survival—taquerías, little Mexican markets, immigration paper selling—brought in the workers’ relatives.Whole families left Guanajuato and Monterrey and Usulután and El Petén to settle CONCLUSION

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down in little towns called Crossville, Carthage, Clarksville, Shelbyville’’ (Home 16). The countries from which these immigrants came range from Mexico and El Salvador to Guatemala. As a rough representation of Tennessee’s growing Latina/o population, consider these U.S. Census figures: ‘‘Between 1990 and 1997, the state’s Hispanic population grew 73 percent, from 32,742 to 56,614 [. . .]. The overall state population grew by 10 percent’’ (Wolfson). I do not want to turn this literary text into a representative demographic sample of Latina/os in the South, but it does reveal how one makes and reshapes community in a land not typically imagined as one’s own. Indeed, the Nashville Police Department hired Romilia Chacón because it had no Spanish-speaking officers and had recently realized that there would be times when interaction with citizens not fluent in English would be necessary. Competing tendencies about these ‘‘tongue ties’’ 16 pop up throughout Chacón’s investigations. On one hand, some of the English-speaking police are absolutely resistant to the need for a bilingual officer like Chacón. After Chacón corrects Officer Beaver’s mispronunciation of the recently murdered news reporter Diego Sáenz, Beaver quips, ‘‘Yeah. Whatever. Not like we need to practice our Spanish here in Nashville’’ (Home 4). Beaver comes off as either ignorant of the changing Nashvillian population or, more likely because of his tone, irritated that his hometown just is not what it used to be. The tension between Hispanics and police officers was also the topic of a February 2004 ‘‘listening forum’’ in Nashville aimed at improving relations between the police and Hispanic residents (Wadhwani). On the other side of the linguistic divide, the reader learns that the murdered reporter, Diego Sáenz, served as an intermediary between the two language communities. Chacón and her mother appreciate Sáenz because he was a reporter who knew the Latino scene as an insider and reported on it for the Cumberland Journal, both in its Spanish language supplement and also in English. Chacón fondly recalls a piece he wrote on ‘‘shooting basketball with local Hispanic youth.’’ She observes, ‘‘He had written it in both languages, I suppose to make sure that the entire population of Nashville could get a sense of life among our own. This made Mamá and me like him and respect him, without even knowing him’’ (Home 19). These two examples—the need for the police force to hire a Spanish-speaking officer and Chacón and her mother’s desire to see some type of bridge drawn between the two communities—astutely capture the larger themes that underwrite the BROWN GUMSHOES

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series, namely the depiction of new homelands and the tasks that attend developing communities. These are matters encountered neither in the Chicana/o series, which are all set in the Mexican American homelands of the West and Southwest, nor in Garcia-Aguilera’s series, set in Miami and Cuba. Those writers map out the varied dimensions of Latina/o history, culture, and identity, but the Chacón series draws our imagination to a locale that might not come immediately to mind when thinking about Latina/os in the United States. I want to note as well that while linguistic entanglements may divide the two language communities in Nashville, Villatoro carefully avoids presenting Chacón as aligned with or thinking exactly like her Latina/o neighbors simply by dint of her heritage. Indeed, throughout both novels he avoids a reductive essentialism that would imply that all Latina/os get along and share similar political commitments because of their ‘‘blood connections.’’ Yes, Chacón is proud of her Salvadoran/Latina roots: she speaks Spanish at home, a rule on which her mother has insisted (Home 67). She and her mother are devoted fans of Gabriel García Márquez.17 She wants to establish ties to the local Latina/o community, and she often speaks of ‘‘our people.’’ She never, however, slips into a flattened out solidarity of sameness in imagining what constitutes a Latina/o subject or in imagining her relations to other Latina/os. Looking at a newspaper picture of Rafael Murrillo, a drug lord with whom Chacón develops an interestingly complicated relationship over the two novels, Chacón thinks, ‘‘Though Latino, you wouldn’t know it from his skin. It was [. . .] very light, lighter than my own. Then I reminded myself, we come in all shapes, sizes, and shades. There was no real defining the look of Latinness’’ (Home 40). Here, in this very sentence, is the linchpin to understanding the dynamics of difference, for a post-nationalist understanding of Latina/o identity moves away from reductive racial constructions that read identity strictly according to pigment—a nefarious construction that often plays into the very real racism that seeks to denigrate people based on their outward appearance. This biological determinism undermines all of the productive work on understanding race as a social construction. Moreover, understanding the social constructions of race does not preclude vigilance to the very real material effects race has in the world.18 This passage from Chacón illustrates just how dynamic, protean, and fluid cultural identity is. One must avoid mapping it onto a politics of physiognomy. These meditations on Garcia-Aguilera and Marcos McPeek Villatoro CONCLUSION

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provide suggestive touchstones of comparison between their works and the concept of an alienated Aztlán. The points of comparison about exile politics, the construction of gender, and the increasingly diverse and ever more dispersed Latina/o populations in the United States suggest that these Latina/o writers share a sense of alienation as selfevaluation with their Chicana/o counterparts and that they exploit the detective novel’s generic conventions to examine ways of knowing and being that prepare us for understanding the complexities of identity in the twenty-first century. There are undoubtedly Chicana/os and Latina/os who are attached to older models of identification that hinge on the solidarity of sameness, but the culturally dominant trend is one of a dynamics of difference, and the detective novels studied in this project serve as significant registers of the multiply informed ways Chicana/os identify in the contemporary moment. I have sought to understand these diverse modes of identification in order to create a more accurate picture of the Chicana/o subject in the contemporary moment. Effective cultural analyses and lasting political alliances depend on grasping the fullest dimensions of the communities in question. I hope this analysis has grasped the evolving Chicana/o subject in its multifarious dimensions and suggested fruitful modes of comparison for future research and activism. To paraphrase Marx, the point is not only to analyze the world, but also to change it. May a fuller understanding of the complexities of the post-nationalist subject offer us some tools to effect that change.

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. The ‘‘escape from literature’’ quotation alludes to Marjorie Nicolson’s 1929 essay, ‘‘The Professor and the Detective,’’ in which she argues that the detective story represents an ‘‘escape not from life, but from literature’’ (113). Nicolson decries and revolts against the then-popular ‘‘ ‘psychological novel’ ’’ (114) in favor of the detective story. 2. Indeed, in Susan Rowland’s recent and influential study of female British crime and detective writers, for example, Rowland calls the true subject of her book ‘‘pleasure.’’ Examining the work of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, P. D. James, and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, Rowland ‘‘concentrate[s] on the deeply literate embedding of readerly pleasures in these crime and detecting stories’’ (viii). 3. Porter’s use of ‘‘myth’’ draws on both Barthes’s now-famous formulation of the term and Richard Slotkin’s use of myth in his Gunfighter Nation as ‘‘a narrative formulation of a culture’s world view and self-concept, which draws both on the historical experience of that culture and on sources of feeling, fear and aspiration (individual and universal/archetypal) deep in the human subconscious and which can be shown to function in that culture as a prescription for historical action and for value judgment’’ (qtd. in Porter 120). 4. I should note that Max Martínez has written two crime novels, White Leg and Layover, but as crime novels, their central interest is in relating the story of the crime and the criminal, not the story of a detective and the resolution of a mystery. While that may seem like a hairsplitting distinction, it is one quite common in the corpus of detective criticism, and more importantly, the critical questions the crime novel raises are distinct from those of the detective novel. While Martínez, like other authors working in the crime novel form, including Paul Cain and Jim Thompson, is worthy of study on his own merits, an examination of his novels in this book would distract from the central arguments rather than enhance them. On a similar note, I will not be looking at Martin Limón’s three novels—Jade Lady Burning, Slicky Boys, and Buddha’s

Money—not because of generic distinctions, but rather because the Army detective duo of George Sueño and Ernie Bascom do all of their work in South Korea. While their investigations are quite intriguing, the cultural, historical, and social conditions with which they deal hold no real pertinence for an investigation into post-nationalist Chicana/o identity as experienced in the United States. Moreover, George’s identification as a Mexican American is absent from the first novel, and when Limón draws on George’s ethnic identity in the subsequent novels, it feels, quite frankly, rather superficial and forced. Finally, the only Chicana/o detective novel I have opted not to analyze in this study is Ricardo Means Ybarra’s Brotherhood of Dolphins (1997). I have done so for two reasons. First, Brotherhood is a single-book detective novel, and it is a convention of detective criticism to direct one’s attention to series characters rather than one-off novels, as the genre often requires multiple appearances by the detective to develop a complex and compelling character and a coherent worldview. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the inclusion of this novel would add nothing substantive to my arguments about Chicana/o cultural identity, nor, by extension, does its exclusion detract from the comprehensive analysis I offer of the Chicana/o detective novel. 5. ‘‘Cultural citizenship’’ is a locution that Renato Rosaldo introduced in the late 1980s. For a full treatment of this concept, see William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor’s edited volume Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights. 6. Many fine books have already recounted the history of the Chicana/o Movement. For detailed accounts of that period, see, among others, Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America; Juan Gómez-Quiñonez’s Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise, 1940–1990; John C. Hammerback, Richard J. Jensen, and José Angel Gutiérrez’s A War of Words: Chicano Protest in the 1960s and 1970s; and Carlos Muñoz Jr.’s Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement. 7. In Sisters in Crime, Maureen Reddy argues that the standard history that traces the origins and development of the crime novel, from Edgar Allan Poe to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the British Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s to the simultaneous heydays of pulp fiction, ‘‘excludes as much as it includes’’ (7). Reddy suggests a history of the genre that would locate its origins in the nineteenth-century traditions of the gothic and sensation novels, two genres in which women writers thrived (7–9). Additionally, see Sally Munt’s Murder by the Book? for an insightful reappraisal of the traditional canon of private detective fiction. She tells a compelling story of women writers who have fallen through the gaps of the genre’s histories. 8. For powerful evidence on the rise of the female sleuth, see Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones’s masterful study, Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. Consider, for instance, the figures they offer for women writing in the genre from the 1960s to the present: ‘‘Between 1966 and 1970, 145 books were published by women writers of mystery series; only 6 of those featured professional women investigators. Between 1971 and 1975 the number of novels in mystery series written by women NOTES TO PAGES 2–4

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and female professional investigator novels remained relatively stable at 142 and 5, respectively. During the period between 1976 and 1980, 13 of the 166 novels published by women writers featured professional female investigators. The number of women’s mystery novels in general increases sharply from 166 to 299, with the boom between 1981 and 1985. The figure more than doubles between 1986 and 1990, to 623, then doubles again between 1991 and 1995’’ (28). 9. While Fischer-Hornung and Mueller are certainly correct in their assessment of the proliferation of ethnic detectives, it bears noting that both Martin Priestman and Stephen Knight have recently argued that women and ethnic private eyes have been slow to take hold in Britain (Priestman 186; Knight, Crime Fiction 142). 10. According to this periodization, the first two renaissances in black thought and writing were the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. 11. A brief list of these books would include Glenwood Irons’s Feminism in Women’s Detective Fiction (1995); Kathleen Gregory Klein’s Diversity and Detective Fiction (1999); Adrienne Johnson Gosselin’s Multicultural Detective Fiction: Murder from the ‘‘Other’’ Side (1999); Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Monika Mueller’s Sleuthing Ethnicity: The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction (2003); Kathleen Gregory Klein’s The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre (1988); Maureen Reddy’s two volumes Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel (1988) and Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction (2003); Sally Munt’s Murder by the Book?: Feminism and the Crime Novel (1994); Andrew Pepper’s The Contemporary Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class (2000); and Laurence Roth’s Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories (2004). 12. Angie Chabram-Dernesesian has correctly argued that the nationalism of the Chicana/o Movement required that an ethnically diverse group of people were expected to adopt a homogenous identity as Chicano. She wrote, ‘‘For years I had witnessed Central Americans, Latinas/os, even Spaniards/Españoles joining the ranks of the Chicana/o movement, consciously assuming a Chicano political identity and strategically glossing over their ethnic and cultural distinctions, and being expected to do so for a chance to join in to forge an alliance, una relación con la causa chicana/o, relationship with the Chicana/o cause’’ (272). 13. The alienated, outsider detective finds a telling precursor in the figure of the pícaro. Speaking of how authors can provide ‘‘signposts’’ to instruct readers on ‘‘how to navigate new cartographies,’’ Frederick Luis Aldama cogently argues that in the ‘‘‘discovery’’’ of the New World the pícaro functioned in narratives from that period ‘‘as a guide into [that] new world’’ (Postethnic 33). Further, he demonstrates that this same pícaro figure surfaces in contemporary magicorealist narratives. ‘‘For instance,’’ Aldama writes, ‘‘García Márquez’s pícaro spirit appears as Melquíades—the racial outsider and wandering figure who can see beyond the reality of things [. . .]’’ (ibid.). 14. Geographically, Aztlán maps that northern portion of Greater Mexico NOTES TO PAGES 4–7

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ceded to the United States at the end of the war against Mexico in 1848. Mythologically, it is the site from which the Chichimecas are believed to have begun their pilgrimage to Teotihuacán. Alurista first gave voice to this idea in a poem he delivered at the Chicano youth conference in Denver, Colorado, in 1969. 15. There have been a number of recent analyses of Aztlán that point to both its shortfalls and the ways in which it might be fruitfully reconceptualized for contemporary political movements. Along these lines, see Cherríe Moraga’s essay ‘‘Queer Aztlán: The Re-Formation of Chicano Tribe’’ in The Last Generation (which can be usefully read in conjunction with Mary Pat Brady’s astute analysis of Moraga in chapter five of her Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies); Rafael Peréz-Torres’s ‘‘Refiguring Aztlán’’; Emma Pérez’s The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History; and Daniel Cooper Alarcón’s The Aztec Palimpsest: Mexico in the Modern Imagination. 16. Speaking not of the outsider heroes of detective fiction but of the audience, Carmen Flys-Junquera notes a similar insider/outsider stance in ethnic detective fiction. She argues that the inclusion of ‘‘vernacular and folk beliefs’’ in ethnic detective fiction forces a ‘‘mainstream audience’’ into an ‘‘outsider perspective’’ and that ‘‘by forcing the mainstream reader into an outsider perspective, the traditional outsider, the member of a minority group, marginal to mainstream culture, is made into an insider, one who understands all the cultural interventions’’ (111). The only caveat I would add to that argument is that not all ‘‘minority readers’’ are made into insiders when they read ethnic detective fiction. It is quite possible, for example, that a Mexican American reading an African American novel may not have immediate access to all the in-group codes in the novel. 17. Edward Said offers a different vocabulary for this positioning and process. He refers to it as the special powers of the exile. As ‘‘worldliness’’ occupies a privileged position in much of Said’s early work, from about Culture and Imperialism on, ‘‘exile’’ becomes a recurring theme for intellectual work and theorizing. Said speaks of the traumas, but also the unique advantages, of the exilic viewpoint: ‘‘One of course is the pleasure of being surprised, of never taking anything for granted, of learning to make do in circumstances of shaky instability that would confound or terrify most people’’ (Representations 59). For more on this discussion, see Said’s ‘‘Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals’’ in Representations of the Intellectual, as well as his memoir, Out of Place. Walter Mignolo draws on the power of exile status for his concept of ‘‘border thinking’’—thinking that ‘‘moves beyond the categories created and imposed by Western epistemology’’ (Delgado and Romero 11). ‘‘Exiles,’’ he maintains, ‘‘ ‘have’ to leave the territory where they belonged and, consequently, are located in a particular kind of subaltern position, and that subaltern position creates the conditions for double consciousness and border thinking. To be in exile is to be simultaneously in two locations and in a subaltern position. And those are the basic conditions for border thinking to emerge at different levels: epistemic, political, and ethic’’ (Delgado and Romero 15). 18. Asked in an interview if he was using the conventions of the mystery NOTES TO PAGES 7–8

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genre to get to the problem of identity in his New York Trilogy (of which City of Glass is the first novel), Auster responded, ‘‘Exactly. The question of who is who and whether or not we are who we think we are. The whole process that Quinn undergoes in that book—and the characters in the other two as well—is one of stripping away to some barer condition in which we have to face up to who we are. Or who we aren’t’’ (Art of Hunger 279). 19. In Postethnic Narrative Criticism, Frederick Aldama levels an insightful, sustained, and trenchant critique against a host of critics of magical realism for conflating story and ontology. He contends that ‘‘one of the reasons why magical realism remains a heated subject for scholarly study and debate is the long history [. . .] of confusing its literary and ethnographic components. Since the mid-twentieth-century writings of Alejo Carpentier and Miguel Asturias, there has been a conflation of the literary form with ethnographic content: a confusion of narrative with ontology’’ (2). Consequently, I want to take a moment to underscore that I am talking specifically about ways of knowing and ways of being within the parameters of the fictional texts I examine. I analyze, that is, how knowledge and identity is represented and constructed in the Chicana/o detective novel. I do, however, believe that these fictional representations speak to the historical moment in which they are produced. Thus, the concerns these Chicana/o detective novels raise over identity matters resonate with the social, political, and cultural debates that circulate in the world in which their authors live. Further, while it may be hard to establish concrete causal links between fictional representations and any material social change that may follow from them, works of fiction undoubtedly offer readers a host of possibilities for imagining the world otherwise. Indeed, Aldama concurs on this point. He notes that ‘‘being and knowing within the boundaries of the narration can have the power to playfully reinvent the reader’s perception of his or her world’’ (40). A reciprocal relationship obtains between literature and the world. But it is often easier to assess how worldly affairs affect an author and his or her writing than it is to measure how literature shapes the world. Of course, obvious examples of the imbrication between the imagined world and the everyday world come immediately to mind. Consider the impact Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle had on the meatpacking industry, or the galvanizing effect Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had on abolitionist politics. Although we can certainly agree that examples such as these are not commonplace, numerous other novels have also undoubtedly shaped or influenced the world in ways that are not as concretely tangible. Fictional works can open up our imagination to new ways of being and living and affect the world and individuals in ways that are not always readily knowable or easily quantified. 20. In his Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories, Roth develops the concept of ‘‘kosher hybridity’’ to explain ‘‘how American Jewish detective stories fashion identities out of the multiplicity of American Jewish popular culture’’ (254 footnote 12). 21. Hühn maintains that we see this to a lesser extent in the classic detective story because in those narratives the detective is typically only dealing with NOTES TO PAGES 8–9

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a single crime. Consequently, the engagement between detective and criminal never reaches the level of interaction that it does in the hard-boiled genre. 22. While this manuscript was in production, Manuel Ramos’s fifth Luis Montez mystery novel, Brown-on-Brown, was published by the University of New Mexico Press, whose circulation is undoubtedly more limited than that of St. Martin’s. Nevertheless, as Ramos notes in the acknowledgments, ‘‘the University of New Mexico Press gave new life to Luis Montez—they said yes when no was in the air’’ (vii). 23. Though she relies exclusively on ‘‘the publishers’ advertising of Anaya’s novels [i.e., blurbs from book jackets and Time Warner’s online catalog]’’ (82), Ann-Catherine Geuder’s ‘‘Marketing Mystical Mysteries’’ offers an interesting analysis of the marketing of the Sonny Baca series. CHAPTER ONE

1. Hereafter referred to as the kcdt series. In order of publication, the novels that constitute the kcdt series are Estampas del Valle y otras obras (1973; later translated into English as The Valley [1983]); Klail City y sus alrededores (1976; subsequently published in a bilingual edition as Generaciones y semblanzas [1977] and published in English in 1987 as Klail City: A Novel); Korean Love Songs (1978); Mi querido Rafa (1981; published in English as Dear Rafe [1985]); Rites and Witnesses (1982); Partners in Crime (1985); Claros varones de Belken (1986); Becky and Her Friends (1990; published in Spanish as Los amigos de Becky [1991]); The Useless Servants (1993); and Ask a Policeman (1998). 2. For an account of the various Spanish and Latin American literary traditions with which Hinojosa’s kcdt series is in dialogue, see Rosaura Sánchez’s ‘‘From Heterogeneity to Contradiction: Hinojosa’s Novel,’’ especially 78–80. Héctor Calderón examines Hinojosa as a costumbrista and chronicler in his essay ‘‘On the Uses of Chronicle, Biography and Sketch in Rolando Hinojosa’s Generaciones y semblanzas.’’ 3. Hinojosa makes this comment in regards to a novel he was working on called A Thief, A Liar, and a Murderer. Since no volume was ever published under that title and since the topic is that of his second procedural, I suspect he is referring to the novel that became Ask a Policeman. 4. Since Hinojosa’s fictive Belken county lies within the geographic scope of Aztlán, I think it more than fair to conjoin these two cartographic spaces metonymically. 5. The idea of intertwining and overlapping is a controlling thread in Edward Said’s Cultural and Imperialism, in which he proposes that the critic analyze texts contrapuntally in order to understand the mutually constitutive cultural and economic relations among metropole and colony. 6. For an insightful reading of the political unconscious in the kcdt series, see José Saldívar’s Dialectics of Our America. In chapter four of her Migrant Song: Politics and Process in Contemporary Chicano Literature, Teresa McNOTES TO PAGES 10–16

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Kenna illuminates the connection between comedy and power in the kcdt series. She reads Partners much more optimistically than I. She maintains that it ‘‘emerges as a brilliant figure for the reversal of death and affirmation of life in the Valley’’ (100). 7. I want to be careful to qualify this claim. Rafe, who has been one of the principal narrators of the kcdt series, for instance, could not just be moved out of the series. He has been too central a witness and too principal a repository of historical memory to be simply replaced without notice. 8. Antonio Prieto Taboada, who has written an otherwise illuminating essay on Hinojosa’s Partners, ‘‘El caso de las pistas culturales en Partners in Crime,’’ ascribes too much ingenuity to Hinojosa’s detective novels precisely because he seems unfamiliar with the very specific form of the procedural. For instance, Taboada praises Hinojosa for sidestepping the individualism of the detective novel and for avoiding its Manichaean divide between good and evil. Hinojosa certainly does this. These are not generic innovations, however, as Taboada maintains. They are two of the defining features of the procedural. 9. Winston and Mellerski derive their distinction between the individual and corporate hero from Will Wright’s study of the Western, Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western. 10. Hard-boiled novelists imagined themselves providing a dose of reality to the locked-room mysteries of the classic period. On this score, see Raymond Chandler’s foundational essay ‘‘The Simple Art of Murder,’’ especially the oftcited passages about how the hero of the hard-boiled must walk the ‘‘mean streets’’ and remain unsullied (Simple Art 20) and how Dashiell Hammett ‘‘took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley,’’ giving it ‘‘back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse’’ (16). 11. There are, of course, exceptions to this general characterization. Consider for instance, Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant 1949 film Stray Dog. It is technically a police procedural, but in its assiduous focus on the development and existential dilemma of Inspector Murakami, it resembles the trajectory of a private-eye story. 12. In Hinojosa’s text, the Virgil epigraphs appear in Latin. I have taken the English translation from the Loeb Library edition of Virgil. 13. For a detailed analysis of the Reagan and Bush administrations’ War on Drugs and their militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, see ‘‘The War on Drugs in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region, 1981–1992,’’ chapter four of Timothy J. Dunn’s The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978–1992. 14. The current border separating the United States from Mexico is, of course, a product of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which terminated the U.S. war against Mexico, and the Gadsden Purchase of 1853. 15. For a more detailed analysis of the relationships among the romance, the detective novel, and the national imagination, see Richard Slotkin’s essay ‘‘The Hard-Boiled Detective Story: From the Open Range to the Mean Streets,’’ as well as his fine study Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America. See as well Stephen F. Soitos’s The Blues Detective: A Study NOTES TO PAGES 17–20

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of African American Detective Fiction, especially pages 14–16, in which he briefly discusses the connection between the romance and the detective novel. On the connection between historical romances and U.S. imperialism, see Amy Kaplan’s illuminating reading in chapter three of her The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. For a counterpoint to the detective novel and romance connection, especially the wilderness element, see Bethany Ogdon’s essay ‘‘Hard-boiled Ideology.’’ Ogdon is critical of the connection because she feels it occludes the people ‘‘who define the social composition of the hardboiled novel’’ (73). 16. See Amy Kaplan’s ‘‘Black and Blue on San Juan Hill’’ for an insightful reading of race and gender during the Spanish-American War, especially concerning the relationship between Theodore Roosevelt and the African American troops during the battle on San Juan Hill. 17. For one of the most incisive analyses of the shift from Fordism to flexible accumulation, see David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, especially chapter nine. 18. Policeman is ostensibly set in the 1990s, but there is a considerable amount of competing temporal evidence in the novel. At one point, Rafe refers to the Kum Bak Inn murders as having occurred ‘‘a few years ago’’ (103). Later we hear that Rafe and Sam Dorson have worked together for fifteen years. If we date that back to the setting of Partners (i.e., 1972), then the action in Policeman would have to be set in 1987. But there are more concrete, yet competing, historical references to deal with as well. For instance, the narrative alludes to the fact that Clinton is in office: ‘‘Behind Valencia’s desk, the usual: a photo of a smiling Chip Valencia shaking hands with Ronald Reagan, another of Valencia with George Bush. The present incumbent [Clinton] was missing’’ (89). Thus, at the very least it is 1992, but later in the novel, the time shifts to 1991: ‘‘The ’88 Texas plates were three years old’’ (161). I am going to assume, then, that it must be the early 1990s. 19. While Foucault’s theories of power are by now well known and have been the source of much strenuous debate, the interested reader may wish to see the collection of essays and interviews entitled Power for a fuller understanding of the historical development of Foucault’s ideas on this topic. I find his discussion of power in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, to be his most nuanced. 20. I pursue the formation of family further in the next chapter, in which Michael Nava’s protagonist, Henry Rios, ruminates on the connections and alternative constructions of family. 21. See especially Rites and Witnesses for an explicit delineation of the power these families wield and how they have protected it from generation to generation. CHAPTER TWO

1. See Aldama’s essay ‘‘Ethnoqueer Rearchitexturing of Metropolitan Space’’ for a nuanced reading of Arturo Islas’s La Mollie and the King of Tears NOTES TO PAGES 24–35

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and Richard Rodriguez’s Days of Obligation. His interpretation provides a compelling analysis of the imbrication of space and social relations and how in queering certain spaces each author ‘‘dedifferentiates Chicano subjectivity’’ (582). 2. Since its initial neglect by Chicana/o scholars, Rechy’s work has been powerfully analyzed by, among others, Debra Castillo (‘‘John Rechy’’), David William Foster (‘‘John Rechy: Bodies and Souls and the Homoeroticization of the Urban Quest’’), Ricardo Ortiz (‘‘Sexuality Degree Zero: Pleasure and Power in the Novels of John Rechy, Arturo Islas, and Michael Nava’’), Rafael PérezTorres (‘‘The Ambiguous Outlaw: John Rechy and Complicitous Homotextuality’’), and José David Saldívar (Border Matters). 3. Despite the dearth of studies of Chicano homosexuality, some recent books dealing with Latino homosexuality merit attention. José Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics; José Quiroga’s Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America; and Juana María Rodríguez’s Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces stand out as crucial contributions to the study of Latino sexualities. Nevertheless, the field still lacks critical scholarship on Chicano homosexuality equivalent to the work being carried out on Chicana lesbianism. There is still, for instance, a need for work that would be the gay Chicano counterpart to Carla Trujillo’s edited volume Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mother Warned Us About, or Cherríe Moraga’s continued investigations into Chicana race, feminism, and lesbianism—not to mention the lack of critical studies on bisexual and transgendered Chicana/os. In addition to the formidable work Chicana lesbians have been doing, there is also an estimable array of studies dealing with homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgendered identities in Latin America: Emilio Bejel’s Gay Cuban Nation; Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith’s edited volume, ¿Entiendes?: Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings; David William Foster’s Sexual Textualities: Essay on Queering Latin American Literature; Sylvia Molloy and Robert Irwin’s edited volume, Hispanisms and Homosexualites; and Claudia Schaefer’s Danger Zones: Essays on Homosexuality, National Identity, and Mexican Culture, to name only a very few. These are all models that Chicano studies can fruitfully draw on to think about gay Chicano identities. 4. The Brandstetter series began in 1970 with Fadeout and ended in 1991 with A Country of Old Men. In the intervening years, Hansen published the following Brandstetter novels: Death Claims (1973), Troublemaker (1975), The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of (1978), Skinflick (1979), Gravedigger (1982), Nightwork (1984), The Little Dog Laughed (1986), Early Graves (1987), Obedience (1988), and The Boy Who Was Buried This Morning (1990). 5. The intransigence of some members of the community in recognizing the importance of understanding the shaping force of sexuality has led to a number of ugly incidents. Impacto 2000’s assault on queer studies following the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) 1998 conference in Mexico City stands out as one of the most egregious. Hector Carreon, the director of Impacto 2000, in an essay entitled ‘‘A Cancer in Chicano Studies NOTES TO PAGES 35–38

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. . . Immediate Surgery Required,’’ notes that ‘‘Impacto 2000 believes that Chicano Studies is not worth saving in its current state of affairs. Chicano Studies is sick and needs to be cured. It has a cancer that can spread to the rest of our community. Immediate surgery required.’’ The metaphoric cancer is, of course, the very idea of queer studies as a part of the Chicano studies curriculum and the presence of a Lesbian Caucus and a Joto Caucus as constitutive bodies of NACCS. Since Carreon cannot intellectually justify what he sees as the problem with queer studies, he has to attempt to appeal to masculine, nationalist sympathies, namely the 1969 Plan de Santa Barbara, which would garner the homophobic support of nationalist groups like Nation of Aztlán. He also makes pathetic appeals to a monolithic Chicano community that he believes has been affronted by queer studies. He does not stop to consider that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people are part of that community, because for him the community resides in that masculinized, imagined, Chicano community of the 1960s: ‘‘We believe that the large majority of our Mexican American community would be appalled if they knew what is occurring in academia. Our community is predominately Catholic and as Christians we believe that ‘homosexuality’ is an abnormality and should not be promoted in our tax supported institutions of higher learning’’ [emphasis added]. This singular, nationalistic understanding of ‘‘our’’ community is frightening, for it fails to recognize Chicanas’ and Chicanos’ complex identities, and it poses an essential Chicano subject not far from racist eugenicists’ beliefs. Further, the belief that queer studies undermines the ‘‘original mission’’ of the Movement speaks directly to the alienation felt by many women in the Movement in the 1970s and 1980s. The group’s pathologization of homosexuality seeks to undermine the progress (and there is still a long way to go) made by the field in the last decade or so. 6. I borrow this phrase, of course, from Adrienne Rich’s now-classic essay of the same title. 7. Throughout Foucault’s work, he historicizes and analyzes formations of power, but it is in his late work on sexuality that he most fully articulates his understanding of power as relations of force that cannot be escaped, that shape the subject, and that should not always be construed as repressive forces that hegemonically say ‘‘no’’ but as those that have productive capabilities as well. See in particular pages 92–96 of The History of Sexuality Volume I. 8. This fear of invisibility will be a continuing trope through the remaining chapters of this study. It speaks directly to that condition of ‘‘aggrieved groups’’ (the term is George Lipsitz’s), who must continuously struggle for social justice and human recognition, noted most famously in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I take this up at greater length in the chapter on Manuel Ramos. 9. Taking the issue of invisibility in a different direction, Gill Plain argues that any radical elements of the Brandstetter series are ‘‘undercut by a founding absence [of women].’’ She asserts, ‘‘The performative world of David Brandstetter is ultimately the world of the renaissance stage. Gender and sexuality are up for grabs, [. . .] and irrespective of script or staging when it comes to the performance, all the women’s roles are played by boys’’ (117). NOTES TO PAGES 39–41

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10. Foucault maintains, ‘‘We live in a relational world that institutions have considerably impoverished. Society and institutions that frame it have limited the possibility of relationships because a rich relational world would be very complex to manage. We should fight against the impoverishment of the relational fabric. We should secure recognition for relations of provisional coexistence, adoption . . . (‘‘Social Triumph’’ 158; ellipsis in original). 11. I take the ideas of deterritorialization and reterritorialization from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who use them to conceptualize the processes of undermining and restructuring oppressive social institutions. A fuller elaboration of these terms can be found in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 12. I borrow the general idea of ‘‘practices’’ from Foucault, who in a 1981 interview described his interest in practices as follows: ‘‘In this piece of research on the prisons [Discipline and Punish], as in my other earlier work, the target of analysis wasn’t ‘institutions,’ ‘theories,’ or ‘ideology,’ but practices—with the aim of grasping the conditions which make these acceptable at a given moment; the hypothesis being that these types of practices are not just governed by institutions, prescribed by ideologies, guided by pragmatic circumstances—whatever role these elements may actually play— but possess up to a point their own specific regularities, logic, strategy, selfevidence and ‘reason.’ It is a question of analyzing a ‘regime of practices’—practices being understood here as places where what is said and what is done, rules imposed and reasons given, the planned and the taken for granted meet and interconnect’’ (‘‘Questions of Method’’ 5). 13. There is a wealth of feminist scholarship on domestic space, including Dolores Hayden’s Grand Domestic Revolution, Daphne Spain’s Gendered Spaces, Jane Juffer’s At Home with Pornography, and Alvina Quintana’s Home Girls, to cite only a few titles. This scholarship runs slightly tangential to my argument, so I do not engage it directly, though it certainly has influenced my thinking about practices of home. 14. Nava and Robert Dawidoff trenchantly critique religious arguments against homosexuality in their coauthored volume Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America. 15. Nava tackles the common stereotype that gay men are child predators at great length in How Town and in his short story ‘‘Street People.’’ 16. I recognize that there is still a fairly heated debate about whether sexuality is socially constructed or genetically coded. 17. One eagerly awaits the Chicano/Mexicano counterpart to Rafael Ramírez’s study of Puerto Rican masculinity and sexuality, What It Means to Be a Man: Reflections on Puerto Rican Masculinity. CHAPTER THREE

1. Of course, this nostalgia is also present in much earlier hard-boiled writing, as in Raymond Chandler’s oft-cited, chivalric description of the hard-boiled NOTES TO PAGES 43–56

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detective as a man who can walk the mean streets and remain unsullied and whose code of ethics keeps him above the moral fray (Simple Art 20). In his analysis of the nostalgic appeal of Chandler’s novels, Fredric Jameson describes this nostalgia as ‘‘generally characterized by an attachment to a moment of the past wholly different from our own, which offers a more complete kind of relief from the present’’ (‘‘On Raymond Chandler’’ 636). 2. For a detailed analysis of how Latina/os understand their racial and ethnic identities, see Clara Rodríguez’s Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States. 3. See José Limón’s Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems for a detailed discussion of Movement poetry. Américo Paredes records the definitive account of the corrido tradition and Gregorio Cortez in his 1958 study With His Pistol in His Hand. María Herrera-Sobek offers a feminist analysis of the corrido tradition in The Mexican Corrido. 4. Whether they would like to admit it or not, even the most ‘‘rational’’ detectives rely on hunches. Damasco’s psychic powers are no cause for shame. As Carmen Flys-Junquera notes, numerous ethnic detectives ‘‘have some kind of ‘power’ or sixth sense’’ (102). 5. I allude here to Althusser’s definition of ‘‘ideology’’ (162). 6. Regarding the power of the dominant historical record, consider social historians of the 1970s like Howard Zinn, who attempted to correct the erasures of top-down history with a bottom-up version that accentuated the role of everyday people in making history. His A People’s History of the United States remains one of the classic exemplars of this genre. For additional reading on masculinism in the Movement, see Elizabeth Martínez’s fine essay, ‘‘Chingón Politics Die Hard,’’ as well as the eleven essays that constitute the section ‘‘Chicana Feminism and the Politics of the Chicano Movement’’ in Alma García’s edited collection Chicana Feminist Thought. Struggles against the masculinist rememberings of the Movement also account for the narrative thread in Cactus that has Gloria compiling her deceased friend Luisa’s manuscript about the role of Chicanas in the Movement. 7. While Corpi’s departure from a pat resolution to an ambivalent dissolution is characteristic of the metaphysical detective genre, her novels do not share enough of the overall features of the metaphysical detective novel to characterize them as such. By and large, she writes in a more standard detective fiction mode that does not correspond to what Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney define as the metaphysical detective story: ‘‘A metaphysical detective story is a text that parodies or subverts traditional detective-story conventions—such as narrative closure and the detective’s role as surrogate reader—with the intention, or at least the effect, of asking questions about mysteries of being and knowing which transcend the mere machinations of the mystery plot. Metaphysical detective stories often emphasize this transcendence, moreover, by becoming self-reflexive (that is, by representing allegorically the text’s own process of composition)’’ (‘‘The Games Afoot’’ 2). Simply put, Corpi would make uneasy generic company for the likes of NOTES TO PAGES 58–68

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metaphysicians such as Paul Auster (e.g., City of Glass), Jorge Luis Borges (e.g., ‘‘The Garden of the Forking Paths’’), and Paco Ignacio Taibo II (e.g., Some Clouds). For a compelling collection of critical essays on metaphysical detective fiction, see Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney’s edited volume, Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. 8. As Norma Alarcón notes, ‘‘In the course of almost five centuries, Malintzin has alternately retained one of her three names—Malintzin (the name given her by her parents), Marina (the name given her by the Spaniards), or Malinche (the name given her by the natives in the midst of the conquest)’’ (‘‘Traddutora’’ 61). 9. Norma Alarcón offers one of the most detailed and nuanced studies of Marina in her essay ‘‘Traddutora, Traditora.’’ 10. Based on temporal references to the events in the two other novels, we can determine that it is 1990. Corpi’s dating, however, slips on a couple of occasions. She says, for instance, that it has been four years since Gloria’s husband died. We know from Eulogy that he died in 1988, which would set this novel’s present in 1992. This marker, however, conflicts with the Black Widow’s prison sentence. She was sent to jail in 1972 and released on parole after eighteen years, so that would make the present moment 1990. 11. In her earlier career as a poet, Corpi took up the figure of Marina in her collection Palabras de mediodía/Noon Words. In this collection, as Marta Sánchez maintains, Corpi presents Marina as resigned to her fate: ‘‘Corpi’s Marina does not actively resist the rape. Rather the reader must presuppose a reluctant Marina who felt she had no other choice but to submit, as men would force sex upon her in spite of her objections’’ (184). CHAPTER FOUR

1. Arguing along similar lines, Alison D. Goeller writes that what engages readers in Walter Mosley’s and Tony Hillerman’s mysteries is the ‘‘elusive, shifting, and tenuous’’ identities of their protagonists (185). 2. While this manuscript was in production, Manuel Ramos published another Luis Montez mystery, Brown-on-Brown. Regrettably, I could not incorporate that novel into this study. Its content, however, is consistent with the arguments I make about masculinity, nationalism, race, and work in the four other novels of the series. 3. It bears noting that Montez’s contemporary, Charlie Morell (the Cuban American lawyer/private investigator protagonist of Alex Abella’s detective series), suffers from a similar self-loathing and identity crisis. When his girlfriend rebukes him for feeling sorry for himself, Charlie retorts, ‘‘Sorry? Sorry doesn’t begin to encompass what I feel. More like absolute, total, unmitigated misery. [. . .] If I weren’t me, I’d hate to shake hands with myself, I’d be afraid my bad luck might rub off. In fact, if I weren’t me, I don’t think I’d want to be in the same room as me. The same city. The same universe as me’’ (Dead of Night NOTES TO PAGES 70–79

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198). Later in the same novel, Charlie asks, ‘‘Who the hell am I?’’ (257). I do not suggest that all Latina/o lawyers suffer from identity crises, but I think it is worthy of note that two of the extant Latino detective series feature alienated lawyers as protagonists. Of course, Montez has a real-life Chicano antecedent as well, the renowned activist, author, and lawyer of the 1960s and 1970s, Oscar Zeta Acosta. I deal with the connections between Montez and Acosta later in the chapter. 4. For a detailed account of masculinity in hard-boiled fiction in general, see Jopi Nyman’s Men Alone: Masculinity, Individualism, and Hard-Boiled Fiction, and Greg Forter’s Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel. For a contrastive female version of the hard-boiled tradition, see the Feminist Press’s reissue of women’s pulp fiction in their Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp series. Their promotional blurb describes the series as ‘‘restor[ing] to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres, originally published in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. From hardboiled noir to racy romance to taboo lesbian pulp, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on the heart of the American century’’ (back cover of Dorothy B. Hughes’s In A Lonely Place). 5. Contrast this with the opening scene from Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939). While at his client’s house, Marlowe sees a stained glass window depicting a knight trying to save a ‘‘lady.’’ Marlowe muses, ‘‘I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying’’ (3–4). 6. This quote is taken from the dust jacket blurb on Blues for the Buffalo. 7. I borrow this phrase from Michele Wallace’s book of the same title. 8. Stuart Hall argues that identities are temporary attachments of subject and discourse. He asserts that identities are the ‘‘meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate,’ speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be ‘spoken.’ Identities are thus points of temporary attachment to the subject positions that discursive practices construct for us’’ (5). 9. Recent discussions of race that move beyond the white/black binary include Frank H. Wu’s Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White and Carl Gutiérrez-Jones’s Critical Race Narratives: A Study of Race, Rhetoric, and Injury. 10. On narrative as ethics, see Adam Zachary Newton’s Narrative Ethics. 11. One of the most interesting recent literary articulations of the desire to create a Latino professional class is Ernesto Quiñones’s Bodega Dreams (2000). Willie Bodega, a former Young Lord, in partnership with Edwin Nazario, his legal consultant and front man, attempts to rebuild and revitalize New York’s El Barrio while also funding the education of young Puerto Ricans interested in college—the emergent professional class. The funding for this project, paradoxically, comes from selling drugs to Puerto Ricans who also live in El Barrio. NOTES TO PAGES 79–97

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12. The search to put together one’s genealogy for political and personal reasons also forms the central core of Rudolfo Anaya’s Alburquerque (1992), in which his fictional detective, Sonny Baca, makes his first, brief appearance. It also clearly fueled such narrative projects as Alex Haley’s Roots. 13. While it would take an exhaustive bibliography to account for all of these sources, the interested reader may want to look at Mike Davis’s City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles; David Harvey’s Spaces of Hope; Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space; Gillian Rose’s Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge; Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory; and Daphne Spain’s Gendered Spaces. 14. Two fine recent studies address the import of space and social relations in Chicana/o life and literature: Mary Pat Brady’s Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space, and Raul Villa’s Barrio Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture. CHAPTER FIVE

1. This trilogy is part of Anaya’s seasonal quartet that begins in the spring with Alburquerque (1992). I do not analyze this novel, for it is neither a detective story nor a part of the Sonny Baca series. Sonny is briefly introduced in the novel, but the focus of the book is on Abrán Gonzalez and his struggle to understand his past and find his biological father, whom he has never known. It’s not until Anaya finishes writing Alburquerque that he realizes he wants to pursue Sonny Baca as a protagonist: ‘‘When I finished Alburquerque Sonny Baca came to life,’’ Anaya said. ‘‘It was natural. It was like a visitation of a character that said ‘Write about me!’ ’’ (qtd. in Sosa Villegas 79A). 2. Anaya uses the phrases ‘‘ways of the ancestors’’ and ‘‘señores y señoras de la luz’’ repeatedly throughout the Baca series. 3. In charting the mid-eighteenth-century shift from royal sovereignty to the art of government, Foucault observes of the various practices of governance: ‘‘Practices of government are, on the one hand, multifarious and concern many kinds of people—the head of family, the superior of a convent, the teacher or tutor of a child or pupil—so that there are several forms of government among which the prince’s relation to his state is only one particular mode; on the other hand, though, all these other kinds of government are internal to the state or society. It is within the state that the father will rule the family, the superior the convent, and so on. Thus, we find at once a plurality of forms of government and their immanence to the state: the multiplicity and immanence of these activities distinguish them radically from the transcendent singularity of Machiavelli’s prince’’ (qtd. in Power 205–206). 4. Indeed, because Anaya so heavily emphasizes the ‘‘cultural and spiritual elements’’ in his series, Ann-Catherine Geuder maintains that ‘‘Anaya has not authored mysteries with an ‘ethnic touch’ but ethnic novels with a ‘mystery touch’’’ (85). Further, while it does not merit a full-length treatment, one can NOTES TO PAGES 100–108

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draw productive connections between Kurt Vonnegut’s lampoon of Herman Hesse’s success among teens in the 1960s and Anaya’s popularity since the publication of Bless Me, Ultima. The mysticism and worldliness that Hesse and Anaya offer as correctives to spiritual dislocation and homesickness make these two authors tremendously popular. Of Hesse’s tales, Vonnegut writes, ‘‘A man travels a lot, is often alone. Money is not a serious problem. He seeks spiritual comfort, and avoids marriage and boring work. He is more intelligent than his parents and most of the people he meets. Women like him. So do poor people. So do wise old men. He experiments with sex, finds it nice but not tremendous. He encounters many queerly lovely hints that spiritual comfort really can be found. The world is beautiful. There is magic around’’ (107). All of these elements can also be seen in Anaya’s stories. 5. Carmen Flys-Junquera notes the multiple levels of symbolism embedded in Anaya’s choice of the coyote as Baca’s nagual. She writes, ‘‘The coyote is an American species, typical of the West, whose name comes from the Nahuatl language of precolonial Mexico. In the oral tradition of both Native Americans and Chicanos it is a trickster figure. In Chicano vernacular, a coyote is also a mixed blood, half Mexican and half Anglo. Moreover, those who help illegal immigrants across the border are also called coyotes’’ (108). 6. Having traced out the complex history of Malintzin Tenepal in the Lucha Corpi chapter, I will avoid repeating that narrative here. 7. See as well the discussion of this quest for Spanish blood in Alburquerque, especially page 72. 8. I allude here to Deleuze and Guattari, especially as these ‘‘lines of flight’’ are explained in their volume A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II. CONCLUSION

1. While not an exhaustive list of their writings, the following list is a representative sample: Benjamin Alire Sáenz: Dark and Perfect Angels (1993), Flowers for the Broken (1992), and Carry Me Like Water (1995); Ana Castillo: Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999), So Far From God (1993), Loverboys (1996), Massacre of the Dreamers (1995), and I Ask the Impossible: Poems (2001); Alfredo Vea Jr.: La Maravilla (1993) and The Silver Cloud Café (1996); Denise Chávez: The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), Face of an Angel (1994), and Loving Pedro Infante (2001); Michele Serros: Chicana Falsa (1998) and How to Be a Chicana Role Model (2000). 2. Three other Latino writers of detective fiction are Alex Abella, Steven Torres, and Richard Bertematti. Abella authored a three-volume series—The Killing of the Saints (1991), Dead of Night (1998), and Final Acts (2000)—featuring the Cuban American lawyer/detective Charlie Morell. Set principally in Los Angeles, all of Morell’s investigations tangle him up in santería. Torres has written three police procedurals starring Sheriff Luis Gonzalo and set in the small Puerto Rican town of Angustias: Precinct Puerto Rico: Book One (2002), NOTES TO PAGES 110–129

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Death in Precinct Puerto Rico: Book Two (2003), and Burning Precinct Puerto Rico: Book Three (2004). Bertematti’s lone detective novel, Project Death: A Tito Rico Mystery (1997), features Tito Rico, a cleaner for the New York Transit Authority who becomes an amateur detective when his friend Pepito is murdered. Finally, while her protagonists change from novel to novel and while the emphasis on detection varies, Soledad Santiago’s novels do focus on crime and Latina/o communities and thus deserve mention. To date she has written four novels: Undercover (1988), Room Nine (1991), Nightside (1993), and Streets of Fire (1996). 3. García-Aguilera was born in Cuba in 1949. One year after Castro took power, her family immigrated to the United States. 4. A prolific writer, García-Aguilera has also branched out recently with two novels that are not part of the Lupe Solano series: One Hot Summer (2002) and Luck of the Draw (2003). 5. For a more biting class critique of García-Aguilera’s work, see Monika Mueller’s ‘‘A Cuban American ‘Lady Dick’ and an African American Miss Marple?: The Female Detective in the Novels of Carolina García-Aguilera and Barbara Neely.’’ Mueller asserts, ‘‘García-Aguilera rewrites the hard-boiled genre by parodying many of the stock characters and typical situations of the hardboiled mode, but she nevertheless confirms the social status quo of the hardboiled novel by endorsing a ‘male world’ and a hegemonic capitalist social order through her portrayal of the glamorous lives of wealthy Cuban immigrants in Miami’’ (129). 6. On the impact of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on Mexicans and Mexican Americans, see Richard Griswold del Castillo’s The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. 7. See Gustavo Pérez-Firmat’s Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way, especially the introductory chapter. 8. This truly only begins to scratch the surface of the construction of Cubanidad, exile politics, and cultural identity in the Lupe Solano series. I hope to treat these matters at greater length in a separate study devoted exclusively to García-Aguilera. 9. Not including Solano, the characters named are the respective protagonists of Nevada Barr, P. D. James, Amanda Cross, and Sue Grafton. 10. Consider, for instance, the episode of Seinfeld in which Jerry refuses to order anything but a salad for dinner. His date wonders how much of a man he can be if he will not eat meat. 11. Solano is careful to note on numerous occasions that she does not consider Leo’s sexual preference any of her business, but she does think he is confused. See, for instance, Miracle in Paradise, page 27. Though a minor figure in the series, Leo is a fascinating character to whom one could easily devote an entire essay vis-à-vis Latino sexuality. 12. There is, of course, a rich tradition of lesbian detective fiction in which this type of physicality between women would be presented as unremarkable, though it would still operate against society’s heteronormative assumptions NOTES TO PAGES 129–136

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and expectations. For exemplars of the lesbian detective see Katherine V. Forrest’s Kate Delafield series, Sandra Scoppettone’s Lauren Laurano series, and Barbara Wilson’s Cassandra Reilly series, to name but a few. For a critical discussion of lesbian crime fiction, see chapter five of Sally R. Munt’s Murder by the Book?: Feminism and the Crime Novel. 13. I garnered this publishing information both from personal correspondence with the author and from his Web site, www.marcosvillatoro.com. 14. The most recent attack comes in the form of Samuel Huntington’s diatribe ‘‘The Hispanic Challenge,’’ featured in Foreign Policy (March/April 2004). While the essay’s title may seem staid, note that the cover features a Hispanic man holding a miniature U.S. flag to his chest and looking into the distance, as if pledging allegiance. The subhead underneath the cover photo reads, ‘‘José Can You See: On How Hispanic Immigrants Threaten America’s Identity, Values and Way of Life.’’ As a productive antidote to Huntington’s article, see Juan Gonzalez’s Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (2000), one among many of the carefully researched histories of Latina/os in the United States. 15. For a more detailed discussion of this topic see Flores’s From Bomba to Hip Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity, especially chapter nine, ‘‘The Latino Imaginary: Meanings of Community and Identity,’’ and chapter ten, ‘‘Latino Studies: New Contexts, New Concepts.’’ 16. I borrow this lovely phrase from Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, who uses it to characterize the affective relations Spanish/English bilingual speakers maintain to their languages. See Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature (2003), Pérez-Firmat’s most recent exploration of this topic. 17. References to Márquez’s work fill the pages of both books, and it should be noted that Chacón’s understanding of the connections between Márquez and Faulkner’s writings help her decipher a critical clue for tracking down the serial killer in Minos. 18. The scholarship on race is rich and varied. I give an overview of this complex field in my essay ‘‘Race and Ethnicity.’’ While it would require another book just to deal with all of the scholarship on race, I would like to direct the interested reader to some important recent texts in the field: Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutman, Color Conscious (1998); Richard Dyer, White (1997); Michael Eric Dyson, Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line (1997); Gerald Early, ed., Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation (1993); Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1993); Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., ‘‘Race,’’ Writing, and Difference (1985); Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (2000); David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (1993); Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (revised, 1997); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (revised and expanded, 1996); Jorge J. E. Gracia and Pablo De Greiff, eds., Hispanics/Latinos in the United States: Ethnicity, Race, and Rights (2000); Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, Critical Race Narratives: A Study of Race, Rhetoric, and Injury (2001); Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century NOTES TO PAGES 137–139

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(2000); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism (1981); Arnoldo de León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 (1983); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (1998); Suzanne Oboler, Ethnic Labels/Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)presentation in the United States (1995); Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (1986); Lucius T. Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy (1996); Clara Rodriguez, Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States (2000); Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986); Cornell West, Race Matters (1993); Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (1991); Frank H. Wu. Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White (2002).

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INDEX

Abella, Alex, 8–9, 153–154n.3, 156n.2 Acosta, Oscar Zeta, 80, 100, 101, 102, 104, 128, 154n.3 African Americans, 4, 7, 23–24, 82, 99 Agency, 48, 67–68, 70, 74, 93, 96, 98 Alarcón, Norma, 42, 55, 153n.8 Albuquerque (Anaya), 116, 155n.1, 155n.12 Aldama, Arturo, 26 Aldama, Frederick Luis, 35, 143n.13, 145n.19 Alienation: and Anaya’s Sonny Baca series, 129; and Chicana/o identity, 5, 6–7, 26; and Corpi’s Gloria Damasco series, 128; and detective novels, 6, 126, 143n.13; and Garcia-Aguilera, 134; and Hinojosa, 11, 126; and Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series, 24, 31; and homosexuality, 38, 39, 41, 47; and Nava’s Henry Rios series, 35, 39, 47; as opportunity for evaluation, 7–8; and post–Treaty of Guadalupe world, 6, 131; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 128 Alurista, 106, 144n.14 Ambivalence: and Corpi’s Gloria Damasco series, 64, 65, 67–72, 74–77, 104, 118–119, 128, 129,

131, 152n.7; and Garcia-Aguilera, 131, 135; and nationalism/postnationalism shift, 5; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 81, 89, 91, 94, 101, 104, 129, 131 Anaya, Rudolfo: as detective novel writer, 2; and genealogy, 155n.12; and identity, 15; and macho, 84–85; and metaphysics, 5; and nationalism, 106; publishing history of, 10; and self-evaluation, 8. See also specific works Anxiety, 5, 94, 100, 105, 110 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 127 Ask a Policeman (Hinojosa): and border, 11, 28–29, 31–32; and drug economy, 15, 26–29; and instrumental rationality, 27, 31, 33; as police procedural, 14, 16–17, 33, 126–127; and social relations, 27, 28, 29–30, 32; time frame of, 26, 28, 148n.18; and War on Drugs, 19, 26 Auster, Paul, 8, 57, 144–145n.18, 153n.7 Aztlán, 7, 15, 75, 88, 129, 140, 143– 144nn.14,15 Ballad of Gato Guerrero, The (Ramos), 78, 87, 88, 91–94

Ballad of Rocky Ruiz, The (Ramos), 78, 79, 81–86, 87, 88, 89–92, 101 Bhabha, Homi, 76 Black Widow’s Wardrobe (Corpi): and ambivalence, 71–72, 74, 118–119; and Chicana/o identity, 70, 71–72, 75; and Chicana/o Movement, 55, 72, 74; and epistemology, 74–75; and history, 62, 70, 71, 72–74; and identity, 58, 71, 72, 74; temporal references in, 153n.10 Bless Me, Ultima (Anaya), 10, 106, 120, 129, 156n.4 Blues for the Buffalo (Ramos): and Chicana/o identity, 78, 101, 102, 104; and disappearance, 100, 103, 104; and identity, 89, 92, 100, 101–104; and masculinity, 87–88 Bodega Dreams (Quiñones), 154n.11 Border (U.S.-Mexico): border thinking, 144n.17; and Chicana/o detective novels, 2; and Hinojosa, 5, 11, 14, 18, 126; and Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series, 11, 19–20, 26, 28–29, 31–32, 126; and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 6, 131 Brady, Mary Pat, 7, 144n.15, 155n.14 Brandstetter, David, 41 Burning Plain, The (Nava), 34, 38, 41, 49 Cactus Blood (Corpi): and ambivalence, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69–70, 128, 152n.7; and causality, 66, 67; and Chicana/o identity, 67, 68, 75, 76; and Chicana/o Movement, 55, 63–65; and epistemology, 67, 69, 74–75; and identity, 56, 58, 69; and masculinity, 66, 152n.6; and nostalgia, 64, 65–66, 67, 68, 118 Carnalismo, 12, 82, 88, 89, 128 Causality: and Corpi’s Gloria Damasco series, 55, 56, 62, 63, BROWN GUMSHOES

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66, 67, 75, 128; and hard-boiled mysteries, 55–56 Cawelti, John G., 1, 6 Chabram-Dernesesian, Angie, 75, 143n.12 Chandler, Raymond: and hardboiled detective novels, 6, 17, 81, 92, 107, 133, 147n.10; and industrialization, 20–21; and Marlowe as character, 17, 92, 154n.5; and nostalgia, 151–152n.1 Chávez, César, 64, 67 Chicana/o Movement: and Corpi, 11, 54, 57; and Corpi’s Gloria Damasco series, 55, 56, 59, 63– 65, 72, 74, 77, 127; epic poems associated with, 59, 75; and Hinojosa’s Partners in Crime, 15; and homosexuality, 150n.5; and machismo, 82; and masculinity, 66, 74, 152n.6; and mythic memory, 58; and nationalism, 2, 143n.12; and Ramos, 11–12, 90, 106; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 78, 79, 88–91, 101, 102, 104, 105, 127. See also Nationalism Chicano Moratorium, 59–63, 66, 121, 127 City of Glass (Auster), 8, 57, 144– 145n.18, 153n.7 Classic mysteries, 9, 14–15, 17, 18, 145–146n.21, 147n.10 Commodification, 21, 29–30, 108, 109, 129 Corpi, Lucha: and Chicana/o Movement, 11, 54, 57, 106; as detective novel writer, 2; and fluidity of identity, 11, 55, 57; and identity, 15; and Malinche, 153n.11; and nationalism, 5; publishing history of, 9–10; and self-evaluation, 8. See also specific works Corridos, 59 Cortés, Hernán, 62, 70, 71, 74, 114 Cortez, Gregorio, 59, 152n.3

Death of Friends, The (Nava), 34, 43, 47 Deleuze, Gilles, 151n.11, 156n.8 Delia’s Song (Corpi), 56, 59, 62, 66, 67 Derrida, Jacques, 42 Detective novels: African-American detective novels, 4, 7; Chicana/o detective novels, 2–3, 4, 5, 7, 9–10, 12, 125, 126; ethnic detective novels, 4, 5, 35, 58, 126, 129, 131, 143n.9, 144n.16; Latina/o detective novels, 129– 140; and modernity, 21; NativeAmerican detective novels, 7; patterns of, 78; women’s detective novels, 3–4, 5, 56, 67, 81, 126, 142–143nn.7,8,9, 154n.4, 157– 158n.12. See also Hard-boiled mysteries Disappearance: and Anaya’s Sonny Baca series, 112; and Nava’s Henry Rios series, 47; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 94, 100, 103, 104, 105, 128 Discourses: of family, 35, 84; of gender, 80–81; of history, 107, 110–112, 124, 128–129; and identity, 7, 8, 13, 41, 96, 102, 154n.8; of masculinity, 78–79, 81, 82; of nationalism, 78–79, 89; of race, 78–79, 105, 107, 128–129; of work, 78–79, 104 Drug economy, 15, 19, 21, 22, 26–29, 71, 109 Effects: and agency, 96; and identity, 102 Ellison, Ralph, 95, 96, 97–98 Epistemology (ways of knowing), 8, 62, 67, 69, 74–75, 126, 128 Erasure, 42–43, 49, 53, 78, 110, 114 Ethnic detective novels, 4–5, 35, 58, 126, 129, 131, 143n.9, 144n.16 Ethics, 6, 96–97, 108, 152n.1 Eulogy for a Brown Angel (Corpi):

and Chicana/o identity, 61–62, 63, 75; and Chicana/o Movement, 55, 59, 61, 63, 65, 74; and family crisis, 71; and identity, 58, 60; and nationalism, 58–59, 63; and reason, 59, 152n.4 Exilic viewpoint, 46–47, 130, 131–133, 144n.17 Existential questions, 6, 11–12, 78, 79–80, 100, 103, 128 Familia: and Chicana/o detective novels, 2; and Chicana/o identity, 126; and machismo, 84; and Nava’s Henry Rios series, 35, 44, 45, 50, 52, 54, 127; reterritorializing of, 43, 52–53, 151n.11; significations of, 42–43 Family: and Anaya’s Zia Summer, 111–112; definition of, 43–44; and Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series, 15, 27, 28, 30; and homosexuality, 36, 49, 52; and masculinity, 83–84; and Nava, 11, 52; and Nava’s Henry Rios series, 34, 35, 36, 40, 41–42, 44–45, 47, 48– 50, 127; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 83–84 Feminism: and Chicana/o detective novels, 2; and Corpi’s Gloria Damasco series, 54, 55, 63, 72, 73–74, 127–128, 133; feminists as malinches, 70; and nostalgia, 66. See also Women’s detective novels Flores, Juan, 137 Flys-Junquera, Carmen, 129, 144n.16, 152n.4, 156n.5 Forrest, Katherine, 35, 45 Forter, Greg, 83 Foucault, Michel: and agency, 48; and governmentality, 107, 155n.3; and history as archaeology, 111; and poverty of relations, 43, 151n.10; and power, 27, 40–41, 148n.19, INDEX

177

150n.7; and practices, 151n.12; and present, 61–62 Fusco, Coco, 72 Garcia-Aguilera, Carolina, 121, 129– 136, 157n.5 Gender: and Anaya, 85; and Chicana/o identity, 126; and Corpi’s Black Widow’s Wardrobe, 72; and familia, 84; and Garcia-Aguilera, 131, 133–136; and Nava, 45; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 81, 83, 84, 104. See also Masculinity Genealogy, 100, 114, 118, 124, 155n.12 Geography, 103–104, 137 Geuder, Ann-Catherine, 155–156n.4 Gloria Damasco series (Corpi): and ambivalence, 64, 65, 67–72, 74– 77, 104, 118–119, 128, 129, 131, 152n.7; and causality, 55, 56, 62, 63, 66, 67, 75, 128; and Chicana/o identity, 57–58, 61–63, 67–72, 75–77, 104, 126; and Chicana/o Movement, 55, 56, 59, 63–65, 72, 74, 77, 127; and epistemology, 62, 67, 69, 74–75, 128; and feminism, 54, 55, 63, 72, 73–74, 127–128, 133; and history, 55–58, 60, 61–63, 66, 67, 70–74, 77, 78, 90, 108, 110, 128; and identity, 55–58, 60, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75–76, 78, 104; and memory, 55, 60, 61–62, 64, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 75, 76, 121; and nationalism, 58–59, 63, 74, 75, 76, 127, 128; and nostalgia, 56, 64, 65–66, 67, 68, 93, 118 Goeller, Alison D., 153 Gómez-Quiñones, Juan, 60 Gonzales, Rodolfo ‘‘Corky,’’ 60, 75, 106 Gonzales-Berry, Erlinda, 114–115, 117, 123 González, Ray, 80 Governance, 107, 123 Governmentality, 107, 155n.3 BROWN GUMSHOES

178

Grafton, Sue, 3, 4, 56, 81 Grape workers’ strike, 62, 64, 66, 121, 127 Greene, Gayle, 61, 66 Guattari, Félix, 151n.11, 156n.8 Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl, 7 Hall, Stuart, 154n.8 Hames-García, Michael, 39–40 Hammett, Dashiell, 20–21, 81, 107, 133, 147n.10 Hansen, Joseph, 36, 41, 149n.4 Hard-boiled mysteries: and Anaya’s Sonny Baca series, 106; and classic mysteries, 147n.10; and Corpi’s Gloria Damasco series, 55, 133; and Garcia-Aguilera, 133–134; and identity, 146n.21; and instrumental rationality, 17; and liberal ideology, 107; and masculinity, 80, 82, 83, 88, 134, 136, 154n.4; and mean streets, 6, 20–21, 152n.1; and modernity, 21; and myth construction, 20; and nostalgia, 56, 151–152n.1; police procedurals compared to, 18; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 79, 80–81, 104 Henry Rios series (Nava): and alienation, 35, 39, 47; and familia, 35, 44, 45, 50, 52, 54, 127; and family, 34, 35, 36, 40, 41–42, 44–45, 47, 48–50, 127; and heteronormativity, 35, 39, 41, 51, 52, 127; and home, 34, 35, 36, 45–47, 50, 52, 54; and homophobia, 38, 41, 48–50, 52; and homosexuality, 34–38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 47, 48–51, 54, 127; and identity, 34, 36, 37–42, 48, 104; and invisibility, 41, 150n.8; and post-nationalism, 33, 34, 39; and race, 34, 35, 36, 37–38, 39, 40; and sexuality, 34, 35, 36–37, 39, 40, 47, 51–52 Heteronormativity: and family, 43,

45, 48; and Nava’s Henry Rios series, 35, 39, 41, 51, 52, 127 Hidden Law, The (Nava), 34, 37–38, 39, 41, 52 Himes, Chester, 4, 107 Hinojosa, Rolando: and alienation, 11, 126; publishing history of, 9– 10; and self-evaluation, 8; and U.S.-Mexico border relations, 5, 11, 14, 18. See also specific works History: and Anaya’s Sonny Baca series, 108–119, 121–122, 123, 124, 128, 129; as archaeology, 111; and Corpi’s Gloria Damasco series, 55–58, 60, 61–63, 66, 67, 70–74, 77, 78, 90, 108, 110, 128; fluidity of, 34, 111; and Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series, 14, 23– 25, 26, 108; origins distinguished from, 112–113; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 78, 89, 90, 99, 101, 102, 103, 110, 128 Home: and Chicana/o identity, 126; and Nava’s Henry Rios series, 34, 35, 36, 45–47, 50, 52, 54 Homophobia, 38, 41, 48–50, 52 Homosexuality: and Chicana/o detective novels, 2; and Chicana/o identity, 35–36, 42, 149n.3, 150n.5; and Garcia-Aguilera, 135; lesbianism, 36, 42, 44, 127, 149n.3, 157–158n.12; and Nava, 11; and Nava’s Henry Rios series, 34–38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 47, 48–51, 54, 127; violence against, 5 Horkheimer, Max, 16, 27, 29 Hühn, Peter, 9, 145–146n.21 Identity: and Abella, 153–154n.3; and Anaya’s Sonny Baca series, 107, 112, 116–119; construction of, 56, 58, 102, 111, 145n.19; and Corpi’s Gloria Damasco series, 55–58, 60, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75–76, 78, 104; and detective novels, 8–9, 20, 126,

144–145n.18; and discourses, 7, 8, 13, 41, 96, 102, 154n.8; fluidity of, 11, 34, 55, 58, 79, 116, 134; and Garcia-Aguilera, 131–134; and Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series, 15, 33, 104; and masculinity, 80; national identity, 20; and nationalism/post-nationalism shift, 5–6; and Nava’s Henry Rios series, 34, 36, 37–42, 48, 104; open-endedness of, 125; and postnationalism, 2; as process, 9; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 78, 79, 81, 89, 91–94, 98–99, 100, 101–104, 105; and work, 87 Instrumental rationality: and Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series, 15, 16, 24, 27, 31, 33, 127; and history, 25; and social relations, 18 Invisibility: and Nava’s Henry Rios series, 41, 150n.8; and Plain, 150n.9; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 78, 89, 92, 94–99, 103, 105 Jameson, Fredric, 66, 152n.1 Jewish-American detective novels, 8 Jones, Manina, 4, 10, 17, 56, 67, 142– 143n.8 Klail City Death Trip series (Hinojosa): and drug economy, 15, 19, 21, 22, 26–29; and history, 14, 23–25, 26, 108; and instrumental rationality, 15, 16, 24, 27, 31, 33, 127; and late capitalism, 15, 16, 20, 21, 25–26, 28, 30, 32, 126; and nostalgia, 21, 22–25, 26, 32–33, 93; and order, 14, 18, 27, 31; and police procedurals, 14, 16–17, 33, 126– 127; and social relations, 15–16, 18, 19, 26–30, 32, 126 Knowable world, 1, 5, 125, 126 Knowledge, 8, 69, 101, 145n.19 Korean Love Songs (Hinojosa), 26 INDEX

179

Last Client of Luis Montez, The (Ramos): and anxiety, 100, 105; and Chicana/o identity, 78, 95; and Chicana/o Movement, 88– 89, 101; and disappearance, 94, 105; and family, 84; and identity, 92, 94–95, 98–99; and invisibility, 92, 94, 95–96, 97, 98–99; and race, 94–95, 98–100 Late capitalism: and Anaya’s Sonny Baca series, 120; and Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series, 15, 16, 20, 21, 25–26, 28, 30, 32, 126; and police procedurals, 18 Latina/o detective novels: and Garcia-Aguilera, 129–136, 139– 140; and McPeek Villatoro, 129, 136–140 Latina/o Studies, 12, 137 Lesbianism, 36, 42, 44, 127, 149n.3, 157–158n.12 Limón, José, 68 Limón, Martin, 141–142n.4 Lipstiz, George, 12, 150n.8 Luis Montez series (Ramos): and ambivalence, 81, 89, 91, 94, 101, 104, 129, 131; and anxiety, 94, 100, 105; and Chicana/o Movement, 78, 79, 88–91, 101, 102, 104, 105, 127; and disappearance, 94, 100, 103, 104, 105, 128; and existential questions, 78, 79–80, 100, 103, 128; and gender, 81, 83, 84, 104; and hardboiled mysteries, 79, 80–81, 104; and history, 78, 89, 90, 99, 101, 102, 103, 110, 128; and identity, 78, 79, 81, 89, 91–94, 98–99, 100, 101– 104, 105; and invisibility, 78, 89, 92, 94–99, 103, 105; and masculinity, 78, 79–88, 93, 104, 127, 128; and nationalism, 78, 79, 80–81, 88–89, 92, 102–103, 104, 127, 128; and post-nationalism, 78, 79, 88, 91, 92, 95, 99, 103, 104, 128; and race, 79, 80, 89, 92, 94–95, 98–100, BROWN GUMSHOES

180

102, 104, 105, 128; and racism, 79, 95, 96, 98–99, 102, 105; and social relations, 92–93, 96, 99–100 Macho/machismo, 51, 81–83, 84–85, 86, 87 Maciel, David, 114–115, 117, 123 Malinche/Marina/Malintzin, 62, 70, 71, 72–74, 114, 153n.11 Martínez, Max, 141n.4 Martínez, Rubén, 6–7 Masculinity: and Anaya, 84–85; and Chicana/o detective novels, 2; and Chicana/o identity, 39, 80, 82; and Chicana/o Movement, 66, 74, 152n.6; and Corpi’s Cactus Blood, 66, 152n.6; and hard-boiled mysteries, 80, 82, 83, 88, 134, 136, 154n.4; and Nava’s Rag and Bone, 46, 51; and Ramos, 11–12, 77; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 78, 79–88, 93, 104, 127, 128 McCann, Sean, 106, 107 McKenna, Teresa, 146–147n.6 McPeek Villatoro, Marcos, 12, 129, 136–139 Mean streets, 6, 20–21, 92, 152n.1 Mellerski, Nancy, 17, 18 Memory: and Anaya’s Sonny Baca series, 110, 113, 118, 119, 121–122; and Chicana/o identity, 76–77; and Corpi’s Gloria Damasco series, 55, 60, 61–62, 64, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 75, 76, 121; and Nava’s Henry Rios series, 42 Merivale, Patricia, 152–153n.7 Metaphysical detective fiction, 78, 152–153n.7 Metaphysics, 5, 108, 120, 122–123, 129 Montoya, José, 59 Moraga, Cherríe, 69, 127, 149n.3 Mosley, Walter, 4, 6 Mueller, Monika, 4, 157n.5 Muller, Marcia, 3, 56, 81

Munt, Sally R., 142n.7 Mysticism and the mystical, 2, 12, 106, 108, 156n.4 Mythical beliefs, 12, 106, 107, 119 Mythic memory, 58, 66, 75 Myths of culture, 2, 7, 143–144n.14 National identity, 20 Nationalism: and Anaya, 106, 124; and Anaya’s Sonny Baca series, 106; and Atzlán, 7; and Chicana/o Movement, 2; and Corpi’s Gloria Damasco series, 58–59, 63, 74, 75, 76, 127, 128; and family, 53; Limón on, 68; and mythic memory, 75; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 78, 79, 80–81, 88–89, 92, 102–103, 104, 127, 128; shift to post-nationalism, 5–6, 12, 92, 102– 103, 105, 110, 125, 126, 143n.12. See also Chicana/o Movement Native-American detective novels, 7 Nature, 68–69, 71, 76, 121–122 Nava, Michael: as detective novel writer, 2; and family, 11, 52; and homosexuality, 11; and identity, 15; publishing history of, 10; and self-evaluation, 8; and violence against homosexuals, 5. See also specific works Nealon, Jeffrey, 57, 68, 96 Neely, Barbara, 4 Nostalgia: and Anaya’s Sonny Baca series, 123–124; for Chicana/o Movement, 55, 64, 65, 68; and Corpi’s Gloria Damasco series, 56, 64, 65–66, 67, 68, 93, 118; and familia, 42; and Garcia-Aguilera, 132; and hard-boiled mysteries, 56, 151–152n.1; and Hinojosa, 11; and Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series, 21, 22–25, 26, 32– 33, 93; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 79; and women’s detective novels, 56, 67

Ontology (ways of being): and Auster’s City of Glass, 57; and Corpi’s Gloria Damasco series, 69, 128; and detective novels, 8, 126; and Ramos’s Blues for the Buffalo, 100, 104 Order: and classic mysteries, 14– 15; and Corpi’s Gloria Damasco series, 56, 69; and detective novel, 5, 6, 16, 57; and Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series, 14, 18, 27, 31 Origins, 112–113, 123–124 Ortiz, Ricardo, 41 Panek, Leroy L., 18, 33 Paredes, Américo, 152n.3 Paretsky, Sara, 3, 4, 56, 81, 131 Partners in Crime (Hinojosa): and Chicana/o Movement, 15; and drug economy, 19, 21, 22, 26; and history, 23–25, 26; and nostalgia, 21, 22–25, 26, 32–33; and order, 14, 18; as police procedural, 14, 16– 17, 33, 126–127; and U.S.-Mexico border relations, 11, 19–20, 26 Pepper, Andrew, 7, 58 Pérez-Torres, Rafael, 58 Police procedurals: features of, 17– 18, 21–22, 27, 33, 147n.8; and Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series, 14, 16–17, 33, 126–127; and late capitalism, 18; and myth construction, 20 Porter, Dennis, 2, 141n.3 Post-nationalism: and Anaya’s Sonny Baca series, 123; and Chicana/o detective novel, 2, 5, 12; and Chicana/o identity, 2, 5–6, 9, 11, 12, 104, 105, 110, 117–118, 125– 126, 127, 140; and Corpi’s Gloria Damasco series, 128; and Hinojosa, 11, 33; and Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series, 15, 127; and Nava’s Henry Rios series, 33, INDEX

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34, 39; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 78, 79, 88, 91, 92, 95, 99, 103, 104, 128; shift from nationalism, 5–6, 12, 92, 102–103, 105, 110, 125, 126, 143n.12 Poverty of relations, 43, 45, 53, 54, 151n.10 Power: and Anaya’s Sonny Baca series, 119, 120, 122–123, 129; and Cortés, 70; and familia, 42, 53; and Foucault, 27, 40–41, 148n.19, 150n.7; and Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series, 26, 30; and identity, 77, 98; and Nava’s Rag and Bone, 47–48; in police procedurals, 17; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 89; and relations of force, 27; of State, 107 Practice of home, 35, 45–47, 48, 50, 52 Practices: and family, 35; and Foucault, 151n.12; and identity, 154n.8; and Nava’s Rag and Bone, 45–47, 48, 50, 52; and Ramos’s The Last Client of Luis Montez, 99 Priestman, Martin, 1–2 Protean nature of identity, 2, 34 Provisional identity, 55, 58, 116 Queer: queer studies, 150n.5; queering of family, 43, 47, 53; queering of identity, 127; and Rechy, 35 Quiñones, Ernesto, 154n.11 Race: and Anaya’s Sonny Baca series, 116, 117, 118, 119, 123; and black/white color line, 58, 95; and Chicana/o identity, 126; and ethics of interracial encounters, 96–97; and Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series, 20, 24, 25; and Nava’s Henry Rios series, 34, 35, 36, 37–38, 39, 40; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 79, 80, 89, 92, BROWN GUMSHOES

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94–95, 98–100, 102, 104, 105, 128; as social construction, 139 Racism: and Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series, 32; and mythic memory, 58; and Nava’s Goldenboy, 36; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 79, 95, 96, 98–99, 102, 105; and social relations, 41; and U.S.–Mexico border relations, 131 Rag and Bone (Nava): and familia, 44, 45, 50, 52; and family, 44–45, 47, 48–50; and home, 45–47, 50; and homosexuality, 44, 48–51; and identity, 34, 48 Ramos, Manuel: on Anaya’s Sonny Baca series, 108; and Chicana/o Movement, 11–12, 90, 106; and identity, 15; and masculinity, 11–12, 77; and nationalism, 5; publishing history of, 10; and selfevaluation, 8. See also specific works Reason, 6, 16, 27, 59, 152n.4 Rechy, John, 35, 149n.2 Reddy, Maureen, 134, 142n.7 Relations of force, 27, 119–124, 129 Reterritorialization, of familia, 44, 52–53, 151n.11 Rich, Ruby B., 67 Romance (genre), 20, 23 Roth, Laurence, 8, 145n.20 Rowland, Susan, 141n.2 Rumbaut, Rubén, 132 Sáenz, Benjamin Alire, 125 Said, Edward, 113, 144n.17, 146n.5 Salazar, Rubén, 60, 61, 121 Saldívar, José, 14, 16 Saldívar, Ramón, 24, 26 Saldívar-Hull, Sonia, 39 Sánchez, Marta, 153n.11 Santiago, Soledad, 157n.2 Self, 34, 71, 83, 103, 123, 125, 128 Serros, Michelle, 125 Sexism, 81, 82, 83

Sexuality: bisexuality, 50, 51; and Chicana/o identity, 126; and family, 45, 53; and GarciaAguilera, 135, 157n.11; and Nava’s Henry Rios series, 34, 35, 36– 37, 39, 40, 47, 51–52. See also Homosexuality Shaman Winter (Anaya): and disappearance, 112; and erasure, 114; and history, 109–110, 113; and identity, 118–119; and metaphysics, 120, 122; and mystical elements, 106; and spiritualism, 119–121 Social justice, 63, 67 Social relations: and Chicana/o identity, 79; and Corpi’s Cactus Blood, 69; and family, 53; and geography, 103; and Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series, 15–16, 18, 19, 26–30, 32, 126; and instrumental rationality, 18; and invisibility, 97–98; and masculinity, 80, 85– 88; and Nava’s Rag and Bone, 51; and Ramos’s Luis Montez series, 92–93, 96, 99–100; and space, 104 Soitos, Stephen, 4 Sonny Baca series (Anaya): and commercialization, 108, 109, 120, 122, 123; and folk beliefs, 110, 111–112, 156n.5; and history, 108– 119, 121–122, 123, 124, 128, 129; and identity, 107, 112, 116–119; and memory, 110, 113, 118, 119, 121–122; and metaphysics, 120, 122–123, 129; and power, 119, 120, 122–123, 129; and relations of force, 119–124, 129; and spiritualism, 106, 107, 119–121, 122, 123, 128, 129; and urban development, 109, 120, 121, 122, 123, 128–129

Space of home, 42, 53 Spillane, Mickey, 31, 133 Spiritualism, 106, 107, 119–123, 126, 128, 129 State, 27, 62–63, 106–107, 128 Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth, 152– 153n.7 Thompson, Jim, 31, 107 Thompson, Jon, 21 Tijerina, Reies López, 91, 112 Torres, Steven, 156–157n.2 Trujillo, Carla, 127, 149n.3 Unified Mexico, 19, 20, 25–26, 32–33 Urban development, 5, 103–104, 109, 120–123, 128–129 Valdez, Luis, 106 Vea, Alfredo, Jr., 125 Violence, 5, 31, 33, 62–63, 65–66, 97–98, 127 Walton, Priscilla, 4, 10, 17, 56, 67, 142–143n.8 Warner, Michael, 43 West, Cornel, 21 White, Hayden, 73 Willeford, Charles, 107 Winston, Robert, 17, 18 Women’s detective novels, 3–4, 5, 56, 67, 81, 126, 142–143nn.7,8,9, 154n.4, 157–158n.12 Woods, Paula, 4 Work, 79, 82, 83, 86–87, 94, 95 Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne, 53–54 Ybarra, Ricardo Means, 142n.4 Zia Summer (Anaya), 106, 108, 109, 110–112, 114, 117, 121–122

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