Magill's Choice: Notable Latino Writers, 3 Volume Set (Magill's Choice)

Notable Latino Writers MAGILL’S C H O I C E Notable Latino Writers Volume 1 Demetrio Aguilera Malta — Rómulo Gallego...

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Notable Latino Writers

MAGILL’S C H O I C E

Notable Latino Writers Volume 1 Demetrio Aguilera Malta — Rómulo Gallegos

1 - 320

from The Editors of Salem Press

Salem Press, Inc. Pasadena, California Hackensack, New Jersey

Copyright © 2006, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997) Essays originally appeared in Cyclopedia of World Authors, Fourth Revised Edition (2004), Critical Survey of Drama (2003), Critical Survey of Poetry (2002), Critical Survey of Short Fiction (2001), Critical Survey of Long Fiction (2000), and Identities and Issues in Literature (1997). New material has been added.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Notable Latino writers / from the editors of Salem Press. p. cm. -- (Magill's choice) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN-13: 978-1-58765-243-1 (13-digit set : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-58765-244-8 (13-digit vol. 1 : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-58765-243-9 (set) ISBN-10: 1-58765-244-7 (vol. 1) 1. American literature--Hispanic American authors--History and criticism. 2. Hispanic Americans--Intellectual life. 3. Hispanic Americans in literature. I. Salem Press. II. Series. PS153.H56N68 2005 810.9'868--dc22 2005017567

First Printing

printed in the united states of america

Table of Contents Publisher’s Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Key to Pronunciation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii Complete List of Articles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix Demetrio Aguilera Malta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Isidora Aguirre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Ciro Alegría . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Claribel Alegría . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Isabel Allende . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Ignacio Manuel Altamirano . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Julia Alvarez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Jorge Amado . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Rudolfo A. Anaya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Mário de Andrade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Reinaldo Arenas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Roberto Arlt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Juan José Arreola . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Miguel Ángel Asturias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Mariano Azuela . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Jimmy Santiago Baca . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Raymond Barrio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Eduardo Barrios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Adolfo Bioy Casares . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 María Luisa Bombal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 Jorge Luis Borges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Ignácio de Loyola Brandão . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Aristeo Brito . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Julia de Burgos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 Guillermo Cabrera Infante . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 Ernesto Cardenal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Alejo Carpentier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 v


Alejandro Casona. . . . . Carlos Castaneda . . . . . Ana Castillo . . . . . . . . Lorna Dee Cervantes. . . Denise Chávez . . . . . . Sandra Cisneros . . . . . Jesús Colón . . . . . . . . Lucha Corpi . . . . . . . Julio Cortázar . . . . . . . Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Victor Hernández Cruz . Euclides da Cunha . . . .

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Nicholas Dante . . . . . . . . . Rubén Darío . . . . . . . . . . José Donoso. . . . . . . . . . . Ariel Dorfman . . . . . . . . . Carlos Drummond de Andrade

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Martín Espada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 Laura Esquivel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274 José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi Rosario Ferré . . . . . . . . . . . . Maria Irene Fornes . . . . . . . . . Carlos Fuentes . . . . . . . . . . .

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280 285 290 295

Ernesto Galarza. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Eduardo Galeano. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 Rómulo Gallegos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316

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Publisher’s Note Notable Latino Writers compiles 122 essays on great novelists, poets, playwrights, and short-story writers of the Western Hemisphere who are considered “Latino” in the broad sense of the term. Students, librarians, and teachers of literature both originally written in English and by authors whose Spanish- or Portugueselanguage works have been translated into English will find a comprehensive overview of each author’s biography and literary career as well as ready-reference listings of their major works in all genres. Although often confined to those born in the United States of Spanish-speaking parents, or who have migrated to the United States from a Spanish-language country, the term “Latino” is here used in its larger sense, to refer to authors living in the Americas who speak—or descend from those who spoke—any romance (hence “Latin”) language, as well as those of Latin American descent living in the United States, who often may speak only English. The term is deliberately inclusive, allowing coverage of many Latin American authors—such as the Brazilian Jorge Amado, the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, or the Peruvian/Chilean Isabel Allende—whose works have been routinely translated into English and studied as part of the Latino heritage. The term also, of course, includes U.S.-born writers of Latino descent—Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban and Cuban American, Dominican American, from Julia Alvarez to Richard Rodriguez to Gary Soto—whose experiences growing up in this country, with all their variety, have been collectively termed “Latino.” Used this way, the term “Latino” generally does not refer to Spaniards (such as Miguel de Cervantes) exclusively identified with Spain. Each essay features a brief quotation from the author, often accompanied by a photograph or portrait; the author’s nationality or ethnicity and major genre (e.g., “Mexican American novelist”) are identified. A full listing of birth and death dates and places follows, followed by chronological listings of the auvii


thor’s works by genre: foreign-language (original) title first if appropriate, then date of publication, then English title-in-publication and its date. The text of each essay introduces the author with a pronunciation for his or her name, a brief biographical sketch, and a synopsis of the literary career. At the end of every essay is an up-to-date annotated bibliography, “Learn More,” which suggests secondary sources for further study. A special feature of the set is a boxed sidebar that accompanies each essay, headed “What to Read”: This synopsis of one of the author’s most famous works functions both as a guide to students looking for a place to start and as an advisory for the interested general reader. Seven overview essays and several other appendices round out the set: • Latino and Latin American Drama • Latino Long Fiction • Latin American Long Fiction • Latino Poetry • Latin American Poetry • Latino Short Fiction • Latin American Short Fiction • More Latino Authors (401 additional Latino writers, plus recommended readings) • Bibliography (secondary sources on Latino literature) • Electronic Resources (subscription databases as well as free Web sites) • Chronological List of Authors (authors by birth year) Finally, five indexes provide finding aids for a variety of categories: • Genre Index (authors arranged by the genres in which they wrote) • Geographical Index (authors by geographical origin and, within the United States, ethnicity) • Personages Index (writers and other persons discussed or featured in the essays and sidebars) viii

Publisher’s Note

• Title Index (works discussed or featured in the essays and sidebars) • Subject Index (comprehensive index of titles, names, and concepts) Most of the essays are reprinted from the Cyclopedia of World Authors, Fourth Revised Edition (5 vols., 2004); some have been reprinted from Salem’s Critical Survey of Literature series; a few more originally appeared in Salem’s Identities and Issues in Literature (1997). Sidebars are taken from many different Salem publications, including Salem’s Masterplots, Masteplots II, and Critical Survey series. All bibliographies are updated through 2005, and all essays and sidebars carry their original authors’ bylines. Several sidebars are new, and two new essays, on Nicolás Guillén and on José Martí, were added to round out coverage. The contributors include academicians specializing in both American and Latin American literature; we are indebted to them for making these volumes possible.

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Contributors McCrea Adams Independent Scholar

Jay Boyer Arizona State University

Patrick Adcock Independent Scholar

Harold Branam Savannah State University

Cami D. Agan Oklahoma Christian University

Keith H. Brower Salisbury State University

Vivian R. Alexander Independent Scholar

Faith Hickman Brynie Independent Scholar

Daniel Altamiranda Universidad de Buenos Aires

Lori Hall Burghardt University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Elba Andrade The Citadel

Roland E. Bush California State University, Long Beach

Debra D. Andrist University of St. Thomas Angela Athy Bowling Green State University Carl L. Bankston, III Tulane University Kathleen M. Bartlett Brevard Community College Margaret Kent Bass St. Lawrence University Mary G. Berg Harvard University Pegge A. Bochynski Salem State College

Thomas J. Cassidy South Carolina State University Christine R. Catron St. Mary’s University Donald E. Cellini Adrian College Susan Chainey Sacramento City College Carole A. Champagne University of Maryland, Eastern Shore Cida S. Chase Oklahoma State University

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Laura M. Chavkin Yale University

Kwame Dawes University of South Carolina

Michael M. Chemers University of Washington

Rogelio A. de la Torre Indiana University at South Bend

Nancy L. Chick University of Georgia

Lee Hunt Dowling University of Houston

Stella T. Clark California State University, San Bernardino

Gloria A. Duarte-Valverde Angelo State University

Steven Clotzman Independent Scholar David Conde Metropolitan State College of Denver Louise Connal Rodríguez Truman College Virginia M. Crane California State University, Los Angeles Sandra Messinger Cypess State University of New York, Binghamton Dolores A. D’Angelo Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools Linda Prewett Davis Charleston Southern University Mary E. Davis University of California, Davis

Nettie Farris University of Louisville William L. Felker Independent Scholar Cristina Ferreira-Pinto University of Texas at Austin Earl E. Fitz Penn State University David W. Foster Arizona State University Dean Franco Wake Forest University Howard Fraser Original Contributor William Freitas University of San Diego René P. Garay City College of New York Tanya Gardiner-Scott Mount Ida College

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Contributors

Craig Gilbert Portland State University

Bill Hoagland Independent Scholar

Joyce J. Glover University of North Texas

Eric Howard Independent Scholar

Mercedes Jimenez Gonzalez University of California, Riverside

Maura Ives Texas A&M University

Roberto González Echevarría Original Contributor

Janice A. Jaffe Bowdoin College

James Green Arizona State University

Alfred W. Jensen Central Florida Community College

James Grove Mt. Mercy College

Jeffry Jensen Independent Scholar

Elsie Galbreath Haley Metropolitan State College of Denver

Sheila Golburgh Johnson Independent Scholar

Joyce Ann Hancock Jefferson Community College Ronald M. Harmon California State University, Fullerton

David Jortner University of Pittsburgh Ludmila KapschutschenkoSchmitt Rider University

Stephen M. Hart University College London

Richard Keenan University of Maryland, Eastern Shore

Robert Hauptman St. Cloud State University

Laura L. Klure Independent Scholar

Terry Heller Coe College

John Knowles Salisbury State College

Diane Andrews Henningfeld Adrian College

Philip Krummrich Original Contributor

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Douglas Edward LaPrade University of Texas—Pan American Linda Ledford-Miller University of Scranton Naomi Lindstrom University of Texas at Austin Janet E. Lorenz Independent Scholar Michael Loudon Eastern Illinois University Gina Macdonald Nicholls State University Ron McFarland University of Idaho Lois A. Marchino University of Texas at El Paso Peter Markus Independent Scholar Joan F. Marx Muhlenberg College Anne Laura Mattrella Southeastern University Charles E. May California State University, Long Beach Warren L. Meinhardt Southern Illinois University

Paula M. Miller Biola University Anna A. Moore Independent Scholar Marie Murphy Loyola College Jamie Myers Penn State University David Nerkle Independent Scholar H. N. Nguyen University of California, Riverside Margarita Nieto California State University, Northridge Kirsten F. Nigro Arizona State University Gisela Norat Agnes Scott College Rafael Ocasio Agnes Scott College James Allan Parr Original Contributor David Peck Independent Scholar William E. Pemberton University of Wisconsin, La Crosse

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Contributors

Genaro J. Pérez Original Contributor Janet Pérez Original Contributor Charles A. Perrone University of Florida Charles A. Piano Kenyon College Adrienne Pilon Independent Scholar Andrew B. Preslar Lamar University at Orange

R. Baird Shuman University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign William L. Siemens University of Oklahoma Carl Singleton Fort Hays State University Genevieve Slomski Independent Scholar Brian Stableford University College (Winchester, U.K.)

John D. Raymer Indiana University, South Bend

Kenneth A. Stackhouse Virginia Commonwealth University

St. John Robinson Montana State University at Billings

Trey Strecker Ball State University

Adriana Méndez Rodenas University of Iowa

Charlene E. Suscavage University of Southern Maine

Harry L. Rosser Original Contributor

Roy Arthur Swanson University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

John K. Roth Claremont McKenna College

Luiz Fernando Valente Brown University

Daniel M. Scott, III Rhode Island College

William Vaughn Appalachian State University

Wilma Shires Cisco Junior College

Jon S. Vincent University of Kansas Emil Volek Arizona State University xv


Catharine E. Wall University of California, Riverside Judith A. Weiss Mount Allison University Ron Welburn Western Connecticut State University

Raymond L. Williams University of Colorado David Willinger City College of New York Sharon K. Wilson Fort Hays State University

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Key to Pronunciation Vowel Sounds Symbol a ah aw ay eh ee ew i ih o oh oo ow oy uh

Spelled (Pronounced) answer (AN-suhr), laugh (laf), sample (SAM-puhl), that (that) father (FAH-thur), hospital (HAHS-pih-tuhl) awful (AW-fuhl), caught (kawt) blaze (blayz), fade (fayd), waiter (WAYT-ur), weigh (way) bed (behd), head (hehd), said (sehd) believe (bee-LEEV), cedar (SEE-dur), leader (LEED-ur), liter (LEE-tur) boot (bewt), lose (lewz) buy (bi), height (hit), lie (li), surprise (sur-PRIZ) bitter (BIH-tur), pill (pihl) cotton (KO-tuhn), hot (hot) below (bee-LOH), coat (koht), note (noht), wholesome (HOHL-suhm) good (good), look (look) couch (kowch), how (how) boy (boy), coin (koyn) about (uh-BOWT), butter (BUH-tuhr), enough (eeNUHF), other (UH-thur)

Consonant Sounds Symbol ch g j k s sh ur y z zh

Spelled (Pronounced) beach (beech), chimp (chihmp) beg (behg), disguise (dihs-GIZ), get (geht) digit (DIH-juht), edge (ehj), jet (jeht) cat (kat), kitten (KIH-tuhn), hex (hehks) cellar (SEHL-ur), save (sayv), scent (sehnt) champagne (sham-PAYN), issue (IH-shew), shop (shop) birth (burth), disturb (dihs-TURB), earth (urth), letter (LEH-tur) useful (YEWS-fuhl), young (yuhng) business (BIHZ-nehs), zest (zehst) vision (VIH-zhuhn)

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Complete List of Articles Volume 1 Demetrio Aguilera Malta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Isidora Aguirre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Ciro Alegría . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Claribel Alegría . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Isabel Allende . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Ignacio Manuel Altamirano . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Julia Alvarez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Jorge Amado . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Rudolfo A. Anaya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Mário de Andrade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Reinaldo Arenas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Roberto Arlt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Juan José Arreola . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Miguel Ángel Asturias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Mariano Azuela . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Jimmy Santiago Baca . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Raymond Barrio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Eduardo Barrios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Adolfo Bioy Casares . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 María Luisa Bombal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 Jorge Luis Borges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Ignácio de Loyola Brandão . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Aristeo Brito . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Julia de Burgos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 Guillermo Cabrera Infante . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 Ernesto Cardenal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Alejo Carpentier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 Alejandro Casona. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 Carlos Castaneda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Ana Castillo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Lorna Dee Cervantes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Denise Chávez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Sandra Cisneros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200 xix


Jesús Colón . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lucha Corpi . . . . . . . . . . . . Julio Cortázar . . . . . . . . . . . . Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz . . . . . Victor Hernández Cruz . . . . . . Euclides da Cunha . . . . . . . . . Nicholas Dante . . . . . . . . . . . Rubén Darío . . . . . . . . . . . . José Donoso. . . . . . . . . . . . . Ariel Dorfman . . . . . . . . . . . Carlos Drummond de Andrade . . Martín Espada . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Esquivel . . . . . . . . . . . José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi Rosario Ferré . . . . . . . . . . . . Maria Irene Fornes . . . . . . . . . Carlos Fuentes . . . . . . . . . . . Ernesto Galarza. . . . . . . . . . . Eduardo Galeano. . . . . . . . . . Rómulo Gallegos . . . . . . . . . .

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Volume 2 Griselda Gambaro . . . . . Cristina García . . . . . . . Lionel G. García . . . . . . Gabriel García Márquez . . Enrique González Martínez Nicolás Guillén . . . . . . . João Guimarães Rosa . . . . Ricardo Güiraldes . . . . . Martín Luis Guzmán . . . . José María Heredia . . . . . José Hernández. . . . . . . Oscar Hijuelos . . . . . . . Rolando Hinojosa . . . . . W. H. Hudson . . . . . . . Jorge Icaza . . . . . . . . .

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Complete List of Articles

José Lezama Lima . . . . . . . . Osman Lins . . . . . . . . . . . . José Lins do Rego . . . . . . . . Clarice Lispector . . . . . . . . . Eduardo Machado . . . . . . . . Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis Eduardo Mallea. . . . . . . . . . José Julián Martí . . . . . . . . . Gabriela Mistral. . . . . . . . . . Nicholasa Mohr. . . . . . . . . . Alejandro Morales . . . . . . . . Pablo Neruda . . . . . . . . . . . Juan Carlos Onetti . . . . . . . . Judith Ortiz Cofer . . . . . . . . Nicanor Parra. . . . . . . . . . . Octavio Paz . . . . . . . . . . . . Miguel Piñero . . . . . . . . . . Mary Helen Ponce . . . . . . . . Elena Poniatowska . . . . . . . . Manuel Puig . . . . . . . . . . . Rachel de Queiroz . . . . . . . . Horacio Quiroga . . . . . . . . . John Rechy . . . . . . . . . . . . Alfonso Reyes . . . . . . . . . . . Alberto Ríos. . . . . . . . . . . . Tomás Rivera . . . . . . . . . . . Augusto Roa Bastos. . . . . . . . Abraham Rodriguez, Jr. . . . . . Richard Rodriguez . . . . . . . . José Rubén Romero . . . . . . . Juan Ruiz de Alarcón. . . . . . . Juan Rulfo . . . . . . . . . . . . Ernesto Sábato . . . . . . . . . . Gustavo Sainz . . . . . . . . . . . Florencio Sánchez . . . . . . . . Luis Rafael Sánchez . . . . . . . Thomas Sanchez . . . . . . . . . Severo Sarduy. . . . . . . . . . . xxi

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Volume 3 Piri Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rodolfo Usigli . . . . . . . . . . . Luis Miguel Valdez . . . . . . . . . Luisa Valenzuela . . . . . . . . . . César Vallejo . . . . . . . . . . . . Mario Vargas Llosa . . . . . . . . . Maruxa Vilalta . . . . . . . . . . . José Antonio Villarreal . . . . . . . Victor Villaseñor . . . . . . . . . . Helena María Viramontes . . . . . Hugo Wast . . . . . . . . . . . . . Agustín Yáñez. . . . . . . . . . . . Jose Yglesias . . . . . . . . . . . . . Essays Latino and Latin American Drama Latino Long Fiction . . . . . . . . Latin American Long Fiction . . . Latino Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . Latin American Poetry . . . . . . . Latino Short Fiction . . . . . . . . Latin American Short Fiction . . . Appendices More Latino Authors . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . Electronic Resources . . . . . . . . Chronological List of Authors . . . Indexes Genre Index . . . . . . . . . . . . Geographical Index . . . . . . . . Personages Index. . . . . . . . . . Title Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . xxii

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Demetrio Aguilera Malta Ecuadorean novelist Born: Guayaquil, Ecuador; May 24, 1909 Died: Mexico City, Mexico; December 29, 1981 long fiction: Don Goyo, 1933 (English translation, 1942, 1980); C.Z. (Canal Zone): Los Yanquis en Panamá, 1935; ¡Madrid! Reportaje novelado de una retaguardia heróica, 1937; La isla virgen, 1942; Una cruz en la Sierra Maestra, 1960; La caballeresa del sol: El gran amor de Bolívar, 1964 (Manuela, la caballeresa del sol, 1967); El Quijote de El Dorado: Orellana y el río de las Amazonas, 1964; Un nuevo mar para el rey: Balboa, Anayansi y el Océano Pacífico, 1965; Siete lunas y siete serpientes, 1970 (Seven Serpents and Seven Moons, 1979); El secuestro del general, 1973 (Babelandia, 1985); Jaguar, 1977; Réquiem para el diablo, 1978; Una pelota, un sueño y diez centavos, 1988. short fiction: Los que se van, 1930 (with Joaquín Gallegos Lara and Enrique Gil Gilbert); El cuento actual latino-americano, 1973 (with Manuel Mejia Valera); Hechos y leyendas de nuestra América: Relatos hispanoamericanos, 1975. drama: España leal, pb. 1938; Lázaro, pb. 1941; Sangre azul, pb. 1948 (with Willis Knapp Jones; Blue Blood, 1948); Dos comedias fáciles, pr. 1950 (includes El pirata fantasma and Sangre azul); No bastan los átomos y Dientes blancos, pb. 1955; El tigre, pb. 1956 (one act); Dientes blancos, pb. 1956 (White Teeth: A Play in One Act, 1963); Honorarios, pb. 1957; Trilogía ecuatoriana: Teatro breve, pb. 1959 (includes Honorarios, Dientes, and El tigre); Infierno negro: Pieza en dos actos, pb. 1967 (Black Hell, 1977); Teatro completo, pb. 1970 (includes España leal, Lázaro, No bastan los átomos, Honorarios, Dientes blancos, El tigre, Fantouche, Muerte, S.A., and Infierno negro). screenplays: La cadena infinita, 1948; Entre dos carnavales, 1951; Dos ángeles y medio, 1958. poetry: Primavera interior, 1927; El libro de los mangleros, 1929. 1

Demetrio Aguilera Malta

nonfiction: Leticia: Notas y comentarios de un periodista ecuatoriano, 1932; Guayaquil 70: Metropoli dinámica, 1970 (with Juan Aguilera Malta, Fausto Aguilera Malta, and Fernando Aguilera Malta).

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emetrio Aguilera Malta (duh-MEE-tree-oh ah-gwee-LAHRah MAWL-tah) was one of Ecuador’s greatest fiction writers as well as its most famous author. Born in Guayaquil, he studied law at Guayaquil University for two years. He then lived for five years among peoples of indigenous and African descent on the island San Ignacio, one of many islands off the coast of Ecua-

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The magnet—freedom—attracted other men of various colors. Other men already mixture of bearded white men and bronze aborigines. . . . The former slaves scattered. The times changed. They lost the fear of finding themselves castrated. Of wearing the heavy iron rings as neckties. Of the red tattooed bars that the lash leaves on the body and soul. Of slave ambition and cruelty of the slaver. —from Seven Serpents and Seven Moons (trans. Gregory Rabassa)

dor. Though he began his career as a poet and journalist, and he wrote screenplays, essays, and nearly a dozen plays, his early experiences on San Ignacio inform the novels for which he is best known. Aguilera Malta’s first published work (in 1924) was a youthful poem. In that same year he founded Ideal, the first of the literary journals he was to establish. In 1930 Aguilera Malta went to Panama, where he had his own column for the Diario de Panamá and wrote for other Panamanian papers while sending articles back to El Universo in Guayaquil. In 1936 he received a scholarship to study in Salamanca, Spain, but the Spanish Civil War broke out before he could undertake his studies. He allied himself with the Republican cause against dictator Francisco Franco, serving as a reporter of the conflict. Returning to Guayaquil in 1937, he founded his third journal, Trópico, in 1938. From 1937 to 1943 he served as Ecuador’s undersecretary for education, taught in a local high school, and was a visiting professor at universities in Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala, and the United States. He served in diplomatic posts in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay in the late 1940’s. In 1930 Aguilera Malta contributed eight short stories to a volume titled Los que se van: Cuentos del cholo i del montuvio (those who go away: stories of the coastal people). Though still un3


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Don Goyo Don Goyo (1933) is representative of the works of the Guayaquil Group, which drew attention to the region’s social problems and its native flora, fauna, and customs. The group’s best-known work, Don Goyo combines the realism of the cholos’ life in coastal Ecuador with the fantastic elements of local legends. The action revolves around the characters Don Goyo and Cusumbo. The former is the patriarch of the town of Cerrito de Morreños, which he founded. Don Goyo, nearly 150 years old, is still the town’s authority figure and the father of many of its children. Misfortunes come to the region when, after a vision in which a mangrove tree tells him that the white man will ultimately ruin and own the land, Don Goyo orders the mangrove cutters to turn their livelihood to fishing. When they disobey and go back to cutting, the largest and oldest mangrove tree falls to the ground, and Don Goyo is found tangled among its branches. Cusumbo, the other main character, represents the region’s average man. After inheriting his drunken father’s never-ending debt to the white man, he had become a drunk himself. Rehabilitated by his wife, he had gone back to work, only to realize that he would never pay his debt in full; the white bosses cheat the workers, taking advantage of their illiteracy. When he found his wife in bed with a white man, he killed them both, fled to the islands, and became a fisherman. He falls in love with Gertru, Don Goyo’s daughter, and becomes a mangrove cutter, but returns to fishing on Don Goyo’s orders. At the end of the novel, Cusumbo sees the specter of Don Goyo at the exact moment the dead man’s coffin falls from a canoe into the river. Although it is clear that Cusumbo will never achieve the old man’s legendary status, he will carry on his traditions and his line. — Stella T. Clark

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translated, the collection launched his career. Aguilera Malta and four others became known as the Guayaquil Group, said to have inaugurated realist narrative in Ecuador. In 1933 Aguilera Malta published Don Goyo, the first of thirteen novels. Don Goyo depicts the conflict between the traditional indigenous life of the island people and the changes wrought by white capitalism, exemplified by Don Carlos, who first helps, then cheats his island workers. La isla virgen, Aguilera Malta’s second novel about the coastal people, focuses on the contrasting worldviews of indigenous and European Latin America. Three of Aguilera Malta’s novels were written as a result of specific political experiences: C.Z. (Canal Zone) examines the U.S. presence in Panama and the racism that accompanied it; ¡Madrid! is a passionate portrayal of the Spanish Republican struggle against Franco; Una cruz en la Sierra Maestra reacts to the Cuban Revolution, which overthrew the corrupt Fulgencio Batista regime. In the 1960’s Aguilera Malta began what he planned as a twelve-volume series of novels based on historical personages and events in Latin American history. He completed only three: El Quijote de El Dorado, about Francisco de Orellana’s voyage down the Amazon River; Manuela, la caballeresa del sol, about Simón Bolívar’s relationship with Manuela Sáenz; and Un nuevo mar para el rey: Balboa, Anayansi y el Océano Pacífico, on Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific Ocean. Aguilera Malta’s last five novels, written in the 1970’s, shift from realism and historical fiction to the “new novel” of Latin America. The most famous of these is Seven Serpents and Seven Moons, the setting of which recalls the earlier island novels but the techniques of which include flashbacks, fragmentation, simultaneity of action, and use of indigenous myth. Aguilera Malta, a longtime diabetic, died in 1981 after a fall that left him comatose. His last novel was published posthumously. His earlier work is credited with contributing to the Magical Realism that has come to distinguish modern Latin American narrative fiction; his later work seems to emulate the tradition he helped to originate. — Linda Ledford-Miller 5


Learn More Diez, Luis A. “The Apocalyptic Tropics of Aguilera Malta.” Latin American Literary Review 10, no. 20 (Spring/Summer, 1982). Provides a brief introduction to Aguilera Malta’s work before discussing what he calls “the magic apocalypse” of Seven Serpents and Seven Moons. Rabassa, Clementine Christos. Demetrio Aguilera-Malta and Social Justice: The Tertiary Phase of Epic Tradition in Latin American Literature. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980. Places Aguilera Malta within the epic tradition, examining the role of such natural elements as topography, vegetation, and animal life in his fiction. Rabassa discusses justice in the epic tradition and Aguilera Malta’s works, focusing particularly on divine retribution and poetic justice. Siemens, William L. “The Antichrist-Figure in Three Latin American Novels.” In The Power of Myth in Literature and Film, edited by Victor Carrabino. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1980. A paper from the Second Annual Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film.

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Isidora Aguirre Chilean playwright and novelist Born: Santiago, Chile; March 22, 1919 drama: Pacto de medianoche, pr. 1954; Carolina, pr., pb. 1955 (Express for Santiago, 1961); Entre dos trenes, pb. 1955, pr. 1956; Selecciones, pb. 1955; La micro, pr. 1956; Las sardinas: O, La supressión de Amanda, pr. 1956; Anacleto Chin, Chin, pr. 1956, pb. 1982; Dos más dos son cinco, pr. 1956; Las tres Pascualas, pr., pb. 1957 (The Three Pascualas, 1965); La población esperanza, pr. 1959 (with Manuel Rojas); La pérgola de las flores, pr. 1959, pb. 1986; Los papeleros, pb. 1964, pr. 1965; La dama del canasto, pr. 1965; Magy ante el espejo, pr. 1968; Los que van quedando en el camino, pr. 1969, pb. 1970 (Ranquil, 1988); Quien tuvo la culpa de la muerte de la María González, pr. 1970; Los Cabezones de la Feria, pr. 1972; En aquellos locos años veinte, pr. 1974; Lautaro, pr., pb. 1982; Amor a la africana, pr. 1986; Federico, hermano, pr. 1986; Retablo de Yumbel, pr. 1986, pb. 1987 (Altarpiece of Yumbel, 1991); Diálogos de fin de siglo, pr., pb. 1989; Los libertadores, Bolivar y Miranda, pr. 1989, pb. 1993; Diego de Almagro, pr. 1995; Manuel, pr., pb. 2000. long fiction: Doy por vivido todo lo soñado, 1987; Carta a Roque Dalton, 1990; Santiago de diciembre a diciembre, 1998. children’s literature: Ocho cuentos, 1945; Waikii, 1948.

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sidora Aguirre (ihz-ah-DOH-rah ah-GWEE-ray) was born in 1919 into an upper-middle-class family in Santiago. She completed her high school education at Jean d’Arc, a private French high school, and later entered the university to pursue a career in social service, which she abandoned two years later to study the fine arts. Aguirre completed studies in drawing at the University of Chile School of Fine Arts; ballet at the Andrée Haas Academy of Dance; drama at the Ministry of Education Theater Academy; and cinematography at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Cinematography in Paris. 7

Isidora Aguirre

During the mid-1950’s, Aguirre focused her creative energies on drama. As a result, she had a profound influence on the public that few playwrights can match. Over a period of six years, from the first performance of one of her works in 1954 to the first performance of La pérgola de las flores (the flower stall) in 1959, the prolific Aguirre wrote ten plays, all of which were performed for the first time by professional and amateur companies in central and neighborhood theaters. La pérgola de las flores was Aguirre’s first play to win for her recognition as a dramatist, and it became the most popular musical comedy in Chile; it was also a great financial success. After La pérgola de las flores, Aguirre began writing plays containing stronger social messages, though she continued to use comedy to some extent. The work that marked the beginning of this trend was La población esperanza. Gifted with a lively spirit and an abundance of energy, Aguirre has succeeded over the years in combining her work as a playwright with a number of activities related to the theater. In 1959, she began teaching drama at the University of Chile and at the State Technical University. During this period, she also developed theatrical workshops on contemporary playwriting techniques, dramatic improvisation, and popular and didactic theater in Santiago and other cities. In 1973, she left her university position to pursue other activities related to the theater. Aguirre’s eagerness to meet and establish contacts with other Latin American writers and dramatists led to her participation in international theater conventions and festivals. During the 1970’s she traveled to Cuba, where on two separate occasions she was chosen as a member of the Casa de Las Américas panel of judges. She participated as a representative of Chile in international theater encounters in Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia, where she also taught courses in playwriting. During the 1980’s, Aguirre’s reputation and activity in the theater showed no signs of diminishing. On the contrary, the staging of some of her early plays, and Aguirre’s free adaptations of classical dramas such as Lope de Vega Carpio’s Fuenteovejuna (wr. 1611-1618, pb. 1619; The Sheep Well, 1936), William Shakespeare’s Richard III (pr. c. 1592-1593), the anonymous work 8

Isidora Aguirre

There is danger! But what would you know of that? Have you ever purchased land on installments, fought to get loans, and all the other intricacies, and then finally built a house with all your worldly resources? If you understood, you would say to me: “Carolina, give me your keys! I’m taking the next express back to Santiago, and I’ll turn off the gas!” —from Express for Santiago

Lazarillo de Tormes, and Sophocles’ tragedy Oidipous Tyrannos (c. 429 b.c.e.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715), the latter of which she adapted in 1984, evidenced a renewed national interest in her work. Through the 1990’s Aguirre continued writing and winning national and international recognition for her plays. Critics of the Chilean theater recognize Aguirre as one of the most important figures among a group of dramatists who appeared on the national scene during the 1950’s. The members of this group, known as the Generation of the 1950’s, had as a common characteristic the rejection of the old naturalistic models that had dominated (and continue to dominate) the Chilean theater since the beginning of the twentieth century. Seeking new forms of aesthetic expression, these dramatists came in contact with the latest theatrical innovations in Europe, which were quickly assimilated into their plays. Aguirre’s works reflect these new aesthetic tendencies. In thematic, formal, and technical aspects, as well as in her inclination toward realism and expressionism, Aguirre reveals a close link to the theater of Bertolt Brecht. Aguirre’s plays have enjoyed great popularity in Chile, making her one of the best-known dramatists of recent decades. She has also gained critical acclaim and won various national awards. La población esperanza received the Golden Laurel Prize in 1960. Aguirre was given the Santiago Municipal Prize twice, for Los papeleros in 1966 and Ranquil in 1972. Aguirre won honorable 9

Isidora Aguirre

mention for Ranquil from the Casa de las Américas in 1969, the Catholic University’s Eugenio Dittborn award in 1983 for Lautaro, and the prestigious award Casa de las Américas in La Habana in 1987 for Altarpiece of Yumbel. In 2000, Manuel received an Honorary Award from the Catholic University of Santiago.

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La pérgola de las flores The popularity of musical comedy, a genre directly descended from the Spanish zarzuela, motivated Aguirre to write La pérgola de las flores (the flower stall). Published in 1986, this light comedy satirizes the upper strata of Santiago society during the 1920’s while depicting the common people sympathetically. A country girl in love with a young peasant and a florist fighting to defend a flower stand in the snobbish Santiago environment are examples of Aguirre’s portrayal of common folk. Aguirre used a factual event as the basis for La pérgola de las flores: the change in location of the flower market, which was situated on an important avenue in Santiago. Needing to remodel this important thoroughfare, the City of Santiago issued a decree for the transfer of the flower market to another neighborhood in the city. Because the market was popular, however, the decision to move it was controversial, delaying the move for more than twenty years. La pérgola de las flores is a delightful, entertaining work dominated by sentiment and a portrayal of the cultural environment. It is brimming with scintillating and ingenious dialogue, which captures the language and expressions of the upper class and the spirit of popular humor with all its colorful figures of speech. Nevertheless, Aguirre does not ignore social issues in preference for pleasantry; she focuses on the people’s fight in defense of the florists. The social implications of the play have been recognized in Mexico and in Cuba, though in Chile, critics have emphasized on the work’s comedic aspect. — Elba Andrade

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Isidora Aguirre

Aguirre began writing light comedies and later moved toward a theater closely tied to the sociopolitical situation in Chile and throughout Latin America. During a decade of rapid social change, this playwright took a stand sympathetic to the oppressed classes and in opposition to the status quo. This political position is demonstrated in her selection of characters who represent the struggle of common people demanding a just place in society. Implicitly or explicitly, these plays decry poverty and denounce institutionalized violence in state organizations, misuse of power, and other forms of social injustice. As a playwright, Aguirre studies in depth the conflicts that animate her plays. On the basis of her own experiences and observations, she creates authentic characters, through whom she issues a call for social change, while holding the audience’s interest. Aguirre acknowledges the influence on her work of numerous dramatists, including Anton Chekhov, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, William Shakespeare, Armand Gatti, and Jean Genet. It is Brecht, however, whom she names as her mentor because of his assertion that ideology enhances the theater. Brecht’s influence on her work has been noted primarily in the formal aspect, and to a lesser extent in the use of epic distance, which limits the audience’s sense of identification with the dramatic world. Nevertheless, recognizing that works with social themes are the most interesting to her “because they are a living testimony which obligates the audience to become aware of the problems,” Aguirre has adopted one of Brecht’s principle strategies: using the theater to arouse the viewer’s critical intelligence in order to promote social change. — Elba Andrade Learn More Andrade, Elba, and Hilde Cramsie, eds. Dramaturgas latinoamericanas contemporáneas. Madrid: Verbum, 1991. Anthology dedicated to the works and life of Aguirre and six other women playwrights. Contains an analysis of each of the plays reproduced in the volume and the playwrights’ individual responses to a series of questions dealing with their conceptions about theater. In Spanish. 11

Isidora Aguirre

Andrade, Elba, and Walter Fuentes, eds. Teatro y dictadura en Chile. Santiago, Chile: Documentas, 1994. Critical anthology that includes essays about representative authors, including Aguirre, and their plays that were written under the dictatorship of Chilean general Augusto Pinochet. It also includes the testimonies of the playwrights about the history of the Chilean theater during that controversial historical period. In Spanish. Hurtado, María de la Luz. Dramaturgia chilena, 1960-1973. Santiago, Chile: CENECA, 1983. The book offers a critical analysis of the theater created in Chile between 1960 and 1973. It focuses on plays and authors, including Aguirre, who depict in their works the social problems of the decade and suggest political solutions. In Spanish. Salas, Teresa Cajiao, et al. “Women’s Voices in Hispanic Theater.” In International Women Playwrights: Voices of Identity and Transformation, edited by Anna Kay France and P. J. Corso. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1993. Aguirre and five other Hispanic women playwrights discuss their work. Salas, Teresa Cajiao, and Margarita Vargas, eds. Women Writing Women: An Anthology of Spanish-American Theater of the 1980’s. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. The first anthology in English dedicated exclusively to Spanish American women playwrights, including Aguirre. Includes eight plays by award-winning authors who have received national and international acclaim. Versényi, Adam. “Social Critique and Theatrical Power in the Plays of Isidora Aguirre.” In Latin American Women Dramatists: Theater, Texts, and Theories, edited by Catherine Larson and Margarita Vargas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. An analysis of Aguirre’s plays, focusing on their treatment of history and its relation to current events. Wilkerson, Margaret, et al. “Women Playwrights as Social and Political Critics.” In International Women Playwrights: Voices of Identity and Transformation, edited by Anna Kay France and P. J. Corso. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1993. Aguirre and seven other playwrights discuss the political context of their work. 12

Ciro Alegría Peruvian novelist Born: Near Sartimbamba, Peru; November 4, 1909 Died: Chaclacayo, Peru; February 17, 1967 long fiction: La serpiente de oro, 1935 (The Golden Serpent, 1943); Los perros hambrientos, 1938; El mundo es ancho y ajeno, 1941 (Broad and Alien Is the World, 1941); Siempre hay caminos, 1969; Lázaro, 1973; El dilema de Krause: Penitenciaria de Lima, 1979. short fiction: Duelo de caballeros, 1963; La ofrenda de piedra, 1969; Sueño y verdad de América, 1969; Siete cuentos quirománticos, 1978. poetry: Cantos de la revolución, 1934. nonfiction: Gabriela Mistral intima, 1969; La revolución cubana: Un testimonio personal, 1973; Mucha suerte con harto palo: Memorias, 1976.

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iro Alegría (SEE-roh ahl-ay-GREE-ah), the internationally prominent Peruvian novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and teacher, was born in 1909 at Hacienda Quilca, his maternal grandfather’s estate near Sartimbamba in northern Peru. He was the eldest of the five children of José and Maria Herminia Bazán Alegría. At age seven, he made the long journey to Trujillo to live with his paternal grandmother and attend school at the Colegio Nacional de San Juan, where his teacher was the renowned poet César Vallejo. Alegría contracted malaria and returned to the mountains to recuperate, completing his primary education in the Andean town of Cajabamba. He spent the year of 1923 on his paternal grandfather’s estate, Marcabal Grande, before returning to Trujillo for high school. He said later that this year-long adventure of living and laboring with Indian and mestizo workers was crucial to his later identification with the country dwellers of Peru and with the plants and animals central to their lives. During his high school years in Trujillo, Alegría wrote stories and poems, and he began to take great interest in political re13

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Ciro Alegría

Rosendo Maqui was coming back from the hills where he had gone in search of some herbs the wisewoman had ordered for his old wife. The truth is that he went because he also liked to test the strength of his muscles against the steep slopes, and then, once he had mastered them, to fill his eyes with horizons. He loved the broad spaces and the magnificent grandeur of the Andes. —from Broad and Alien Is the World (trans. Harriet de Onís)

form movements. He was particularly convinced by the ideas of José Carlos Mariátegui, who advocated major changes which would improve the condition of Indians. Alegría became interested in journalism, began to edit the student newspaper, and started to publish articles in the newspaper El Norte. In 1930 he enrolled in the National University of Trujillo and helped to found the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), a political party. In 1931 Alegría and others were jailed and tortured for their participation in what was deemed a subversive movement. When an APRA-sponsored uprising took control of Trujillo in 1932, Alegría was freed; when the government regained power, he fled but was imprisoned in a Lima penitentiary until freed by an amnesty in 1933. Jailed again for conspiracy in 1934, Alegría was deported to Chile. In Santiago he married Rosalía Amézquita, with whom he subsequently had two sons. He won the prestigious Nascimiento publishing house prize for The Golden Serpent, a novel about the adventures of the boatmen of Calemar, in an Andean jungle valley, who ferry people and livestock across the treacherous Marañon River. Descriptions of the powerful Marañon unify a series of episodes that involve boatmen, farmers, fishermen, and occasional outsiders such as a young engineer from Lima who dreams of exploiting the mineral wealth of the remote region. Rural rhythms of life and death are described lyrically, and men are seen as heroic in their struggle for existence. 15

Ciro Alegría

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Broad and Alien Is the World Published in 1941, Broad and Alien Is the World reveals Ciro Alegría’s commitment to the ideological platform of Acción Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Action), a socialist-oriented political party that he cofounded in 1930. As a result of his political engagement, which included involvement with guerrilla groups, Alegría was forced into exile. The novel openly attacks the human rights violations of the indigenous Peruvian population by national corporations and governmental institutions. The novel’s publication caused Peru to become the target of international outcry. Alegría’s novel moves away from traditional treatment of the Inca, in which they were portrayed as living in the perfect state of natural existence. Alegría’s realistic descriptions of indigenous rural life are connected to indigenismo, a proindigenous movement that encouraged a fuller understanding of the Peruvian national identity. The city’s vicious exploitation of nature, the novel implies, may account for various economic and social crises. Alegría’s novel presents Rosendo Maquis, mayor of a community of Indians, as a representative of the Incas.

Alegría was hospitalized for tuberculosis between 1936 and 1938. His second novel, Los perros hambrientos (starving dogs), was published in 1938. It describes the life of Indian and mestizo inhabitants of the northern Andean area, recounted by an omniscient narrator who is a foreigner to the life he describes and thus explains it as he tells of the ravages of a terrible drought. As in The Golden Serpent, the world described is one in which humans live in very close relationship with an often-hostile natural world. They suffer from the harsh physical environment and from social injustices: The farmers do not own their land, and they are exploited by landlords and by the state. The dogs of the 16

Ciro Alegría

Maquis is wise and hardworking. Considered the intellectual leader of his village, he leads a protest against the local landowner, who has decided to sell to foreign investors the land that is worked by the villagers. The confrontation lands Maqui in jail, where he dies. At a point when even natural causes seem to oppose the villagers, Benito Castro, Maquis’s adopted son, returns from the city and takes over his father’s fight. Benito’s youth and socialist ideals oppose the traditional views of the town’s elders, who fear his radical politics. Benito’s preaching to the young villagers, however, succeeds in promoting an armed rebellion, a political agenda of the Acción Popular Revolucionaria Americana. Although the movement does not resolve the village’s needs, it raises the people’s understanding of the importance of political grouping. Alegría’s ideological aim was to promote formation of coalitions among various indigenous groups and urban and rural proletariat factions, ultimately producing an antiimperialist democracy. Such unity among destitute and marginal social classes, he reasoned, was not possible without a historical analysis of the reasons for their differences. As a novel of thesis, Broad and Alien Is the World attempts to provide that analysis by presenting multiple characters who are representative of the Peruvian social structure. — Rafael Ocasio

title are the companions of the oppressed peasants, and they share in their hardships and occasional joys and triumphs. Despite the horrors of drought and the suffering it brings, traditional rural ways of life are celebrated. In 1940, thanks to the financial support of a circle of Chilean friends, Alegría was able to complete a third novel, Broad and Alien Is the World, which was published in 1941 in both Spanish and English. In Broad and Alien Is the World, Indian peasants are involved not only in a struggle with nature, as in Alegría’s two previous novels, but also in resistance to the landowning oligarchy and the legal and political structures which reinforce eco17

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nomic power. The traditional Indian way of life and its values are depicted sympathetically as Alegría describes the remote community of Rumi. Alegría soon moved to the United States. He held many jobs: he translated screenplays for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, wrote and edited for various publications, and lectured at Columbia University in New York. His interest in political reform and human rights was sustained, and he published many articles on these subjects, although he resigned from the APRA party in 1948. Divorced from Rosalía Amézquita in 1947, he was married to Ligia Marchand in Puerto Rico in 1948. He worked on several novels, and in 1949 he began to teach classes at the University of Puerto Rico. He continued to work on a quartet of novels, only one of which was finished: Siempre hay caminos (there are always ways), which was published posthumously. After serving as editor of the magazine Presente in 1952, Alegría moved in 1953 to Havana, Cuba, where he wrote for various magazines and worked on the novel Lázaro, the incomplete text of which was published after his death. Alegría and Ligia Marchand were separated. He taught at the Cuban Universidad de Oriente and in 1957 was married to a Cuban poet, Dora Varona. After twenty-three years of exile, Alegría was invited to return to Peru to participate in the Third Festival of the Peruvian Book; he spent three months there, lecturing at the University of San Marcos and traveling to various cities, including Trujillo. Back in Cuba, he witnessed many of the events of Fidel Castro’s revolution; Alegría’s account would later be published as La revolución cubana: Un testimonio personal (the Cuban revolution, a personal testimony). In 1960 Alegría and his family returned to Lima. He was elected a member of the Academia Peruana de la Lengua. In 1961 he joined Fernando Belaunde Terry’s Popular Action party and ran for the senate unsuccessfully in the 1962 elections. In 1963 Alegría was elected a national deputy and resumed active political life serving in the Chamber of Deputies. His collection of short stories Duelo de caballeros (duel of gentlemen) was published in 1963 and gathers together many tales that had been published previously in English translation or in small maga18

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zines. Set in remote Andean areas, these stories tell of Indian culture and resourcefulness and of a close alliance between humankind and nature. Alegría participated as a writer in many international conferences, and in 1966 he was elected president of the National Association of Writers and Artists. He died on February 17, 1967, of a cerebral hemorrhage. His fourth son, with Dora Varona, was born after his death. Varona began to edit and publish the many manuscripts Alegría left, and a series of volumes of novels, stories, and memoirs have appeared posthumously. Alegría is best known for his three magnificent early novels, which speak eloquently of the Indian and mestizo people of the northern Andean area of Peru. Learn More Aldrich, Earl M., Jr. The Modern Short Story in Peru. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966. Includes a chapter on Alegría and Alcides Arguedas. Early, Eileen. Joy in Exile: Ciro Alegría’s Narrative Art. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1980. An excellent overview and study of Alegría’s major books. It is particularly useful for the English-speaking reader since she explains Alegría’s background and references clearly. Foster, David William. Peruvian Literature: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. The chapter on Alegría offers an extensive bibliography. González-Pérez, Armando. Social Protest and Literary Merit in “Huasipungo” and “El mundo es ancho y ajeno.” Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1988. A discussion paper. Higgins, James. A History of Peruvian Literature. Wolfeboro, N.H.: F. Cairns, 1987. Provides a very lucid summary of Alegría’s novels. Kokotovic, Misha. The Colonial Divide in Peruvian Narrative: Social Conflict and Transculturation. Portland, Oreg.: Sussex Academic Press, 2005. Includes an analysis of the narrative form in Broad and Alien Is the World. Vázquez Amaral, José. The Contemporary Latin American Narrative. New York: Las Americas, 1970. Includes bibliographical references and an index. 19

Claribel Alegría Nicaraguan poet Born: Estelí, Nicaragua; May 12, 1924 poetry: Anillo de silencio, 1948; Suite de amor, angustia y soledad, 1951; Vigilias, 1953; Acuario, 1955; Huésped de mi tiempo, 1961; Vía única, 1965; Aprendizaje, 1970; Pagaré a cobrar y otros poemas, 1973; Sobrevivo, 1978; Suma y sigue, 1981; Flores del volcán/Flowers from the Volcano, 1982 (parallel text in English and Spanish; translated by Carolyn Forché); Luisa en el país de la realidad, 1987 (Luisa in Realityland, 1987); La mujer del rio Sumpul, 1987 (Woman of the River, 1989); Y este poema-río, 1988; Fugues, 1993 (parallel text in English and Spanish; translated by Darwin J. Flakoll); Variaciones en clave de mí, 1993; Umbrales, 1996 (Umbrales = Thresholds, 1996; parallel text in English and Spanish; translated by Flakoll); Saudade, 1999 (Saudade = Sorrow, 1999; parallel text in English and Spanish; translated by Forché); Soltando Amarras = Casting Off, 2003 (parallel text in English and Spanish; translated by Margaret Sayers Peden). long fiction: Cenizas de Izalco, 1966 (with Darwin J. Flakoll; Ashes of Izalco, 1989); El detén, 1977; Pueblo de Dios y de mandinga, 1985; Despierta mi bein, despierta, 1986. short fiction: Album familiar, 1982, expanded 1986 (Family Album: Three Novellas, 1991). nonfiction: Nicaragua: La revolución sandinista, una crónica política, 1855-1979, 1982 (with Darwin J. Flakoll); No me agarran viva: La mujer salvadoreña en lucha, 1983 (with Flakoll; They Won’t Take Me Alive: Salvadoran Women in Struggle for National Liberation, 1987); Para romper el silencio: Resistencia y lucha en las cárceles salvadoreñas, 1984 (with Flakoll); Fuga de Canto Grande, 1992 (with Flakoll; Tunnel to Canto Grande, 1996); Somoza: Expediente cerrado, la historia de un ajusticiamiento, 1993 (with Flakoll; Death of Somoza: The First Person Story of the Guerrillas Who Assassinated the Nicaraguan Dictator, 1996). 20

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translation: Cien poemas de Robert Graves, 1981 (with Darwin J. Flakoll). children’s literature: Tres cuentos, 1958. edited texts: New Voices of Hispanic America, 1962 (with Darwin J. Flakoll); Homenaje a El Salvador, 1981; On the Front Line: Guerrilla Poetry of El Salvador, 1988 (translated with Flakoll).

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laribel Alegría (KLAHR-ih-behl ahl-ay-GREE-ah) was born in Estelí, Nicaragua, to a Salvadoran mother and a Nicaraguan father, but her family soon moved to Santa Ana, El Salvador, because of the political problems her father suffered as a sympathizer with guerrilla leader Augusto Sandino. In 1932 she witnessed the matanza, or massacre, of more than thirty thousand peasants by government troops after a peaceful protest against Juan Bautista Sacasa’s military government. She published her first poems in 1941. In 1943 she went to the United States to attend a girls’ school near New Orleans, Louisiana. She next attended George Washington University, where she met her husband, Darwin (Bud) J. Flakoll, a journalist who was studying for his master of arts degree. They married in December, 1947. In 1948, she graduated and her first book of poetry, Anillo de silencio, was published in Mexico. Her first daughter, Maya, was born in Washington in 1949, followed by the birth of her twin daughters, Patricia and Karen, in Alexan-

Today the earth is dry and resounds like a drum, my arms fall to my sides, I am alone. My dead stand watch and send signals to me, they assail me in the radio and paper. —from “We Were Three” (trans. Carolyn Forché)

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dria, Virginia, in 1950. In 1951, the family visited El Salvador briefly before moving to Mexico, where their circle included various writers and intellectuals, some living in exile like Alegría. In 1953, the family moved to Santiago, Chile, where they lived for almost three years in order to work on an anthology (and translation) of Latin American writers and poets, New Voices of Hispanic America, which introduced writers like Juan Rulfo and Julio Cortázar, who would later be part of the “boom” in Latin American literature. Her son Erik was born in Santiago in 1954. In 1956 the family returned to the United States, where Flakoll applied to the Foreign Service. In 1958 he was appointed second secretary to the U.S. Embassy in Montevideo, Uruguay. Two years later they were posted to Argentina. Disillusioned by the world of politics, her husband resigned from the foreign service, and in 1962 they moved to Paris, where they met many Latin American writers living in exile and worked on the first of many subsequent collaborations, producing her first novel, Ashes of Izalco, whose publication in Spain was delayed by censorship; it was a finalist in 1964 in the Biblioteca Breve contest, sponsored by the Spanish publishing house Seix Barral. In 1966, the family moved to Mallorca, where they lived for many years. In 1978 she won the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize for her volume of poetry Sobrevivo. In 1979, after the Sandinistas overthrew the dictatorship of Anastasio Somosa in Nicaragua, Alegría and her husband went to Nicaragua to do research for a testimonial on the revolution. In 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated in El Salvador. Alegría gave a poetic eulogy at the Sorbonne in Paris, and her criticism of government atrocities made her a political exile from her homeland. In 1983, they moved to Nicaragua. Flakoll died in 1995. Alegría continued to live in Nicaragua. Alegría brought Central American literature, especially women’s writing, to the attention of the American reader, and with it she brought a concern for the political situation in El Salvador and Nicaragua in particular. Her works have been translated into more than ten languages. — Linda Ledford-Miller 23

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Woman of the River Many of the poems in Woman of the River (1987) directly confront the political situation of Central America and often condemn the influence of the United States and the U.S. presence there. In “The American Way of Death” Alegría criticizes America’s response to people’s desire for a better life: if you choose the guerrilla path, be careful, they’ll kill you. If you combat your chaos through peace, ............. they’ll kill you. If your skin is dark ................ slowly they’ll kill you.

“The American Way of Life” contrasts skyscrapers with undocumented workers, and wealth with wanton destruction; America, says Alegría, is a selfish “bitch” who “chews Salvadorans/ as if they were Chiclets/ chews up Nicaraguans.” Perhaps here she refers to the massive U.S. funding of the civil war in El Salvador (1980-1992) or the training of Salvadoran and Nicaraguan soldiers by the U.S. military. The title poem “Woman of the River” testifies to the results of U.S. support, telling the tale of a woman who survives the 1980 Sumpul River massacre with her baby and son by hiding in the river for hours after the security troops have killed everyone in their path, including her other three children. — Linda Ledford-Miller

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Learn More Aparicio, Yvette. “Reading Social Consciousness in Claribel Alegría’s Early Poetry.” Cincinnati Romance Review 18 (1999): 1-6. Contends that Alegría’s earlier, more metaphorical and less overtly “resistant” poetry contains implicit social criticism and deals with issues of injustice and power relations in a more allegorical manner than her later overtly politicized poetry. Barbas-Rhoden, Laura. Writing Women in Central America: Gender and the Fictionalization of History. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. Examination of Alegría, Rosario Augilar, Gioconda Belli, and Tatiana Lobo to determine the relationship between their fiction and historical events. Discusses the role of gender in telling stories of the past. Beverly, John, and Marc Zimmerman. Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Traces the development of popular revolutionary poetry and testimonial narrative as reactions to historical events in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and the importance of revolutionary Salvadoran women poets such as Alegría. Boschetto-Sandoval, Sandra M., and Marcia Phillips McGowan. Claribel Alegría and Central American Literature: Critical Essays. Athens: Ohio University Center for European Studies, 1994. An excellent collection of essays on Alegría’s major works and themes. One essay specifically treats her poetry. Includes an interview with the poet and a chronology of her life and works, along with a bibliography of her publications and publications about her work. Craft, Linda J. Novels of Testimony and Resistance from Central America. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997. The chapter on Alegría examines two works written in collaboration with her husband, Darwin J. Flakoll, Ashes of Izalco and They Won’t Take Me Alive, and the multigenre Luisa in Realityland. McGowan, Marcia P. “Mapping a New Territory: Luisa in Realityland.” Letras Femeninas 19, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Fall, 1993): 8499. Considers Luisa a “new form of autobiographical discourse” that incorporates poetry, testimony, and elements of fiction. 25

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Sternbach, Nancy Saporta. “Remembering the Dead: Latin American Women’s ‘Testimonial’ Discourse.” Latin American Perspectives 18, no. 3 (Summer, 1991): 91-102. Examines the testimonial voice of prose and poetry in They Won’t Take Me Alive and Flores del Volcán/Flowers from the Volcano. Treacy, Mary Jane. “A Politics of the Word: Claribel Alegría’s Album familiar and Despierta mi bien, despierta.” Intertexts 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1997): 62-77. Discusses the “elite” or “bourgeois” woman as a marginalized “woman of porcelain,” aware of her privileged status but not its political and economic underpinnings. In contrast to the passive bourgeois woman depicted in many of the female characters in novels by Isabel Allende, Rosario Ferré, and Teresa de la Parra, the two works by Alegría examined here portray “the struggles of the bourgeois woman to extricate herself from domesticity and to forge an independence through a ‘progressive’ political identity.”

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Isabel Allende Chilean and American novelist Born: Lima, Peru; August 2, 1942 long fiction: La casa de los espíritus, 1982 (The House of the Spirits, 1985); De amor y de sombra, 1984 (Of Love and Shadows, 1987); Eva Luna, 1987 (English translation, 1988); El plan infinito, 1991 (The Infinite Plan, 1993); Hija de la fortuna, 1999 (Daughter of Fortune, 1999); Portrait sépia, 2000 (Portrait in Sepia, 2001); Zorro, 2005 (Zorro: The Legend Begins, 2005). short fiction: Cuentos de Eva Luna, 1990 (The Stories of Eva Luna, 1991). children’s literature: La gorda de porcelana, 1984; Ciudad de las bestias, 2002 (City of the Beasts, 2002); El reino del dragón de oro, 2003 (Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, 2004); El bosque de los Pigmeos, 2004. nonfiction: Civilice a su troglodita: Los impertientes de Isabel Allende, 1974; Paula, 1994 (English translation, 1995); Conversations with Isabel Allende, 1999; Mi país inventado, 2003 (My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, 2003). miscellaneous: Afrodita: Cuentos, recetas, y otros afrodisiacos, 1997 (Afrodite: A Memoir of the Senses, 1998).

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sabel Allende (IHZ-ah-behl ahl-YEHN-dee) begins every new book on January 8, a practice she continues for good luck ever since the success of her first book, The House of the Spirits. On January 8, 1981, while exiled in Venezuela, Allende was feeling guilty for not being with her dying grandfather. She had promised to be with him during his last days, but the military regime prevented her from returning to Chile. The letter she wrote that day eventually became The House of the Spirits, which launched Allende’s career as a novelist; by the mid-1990’s, she had become the most widely read Latin American woman writer. 27

Isabel Allende

Born to Chilean diplomat Tomás Allende and his wife Francisca Llona Barros, who separated after a few years of marriage, Isabel Allende and her two brothers lived in their maternal grandparents’ home in Santiago, where their mother offset her economic dependence on her parents by working in a bank and stitching at home. During her childhood, the grandparents’ library became a favorite spot. Allende enjoyed access to their large collection as well as the intellectual freedom to read books well beyond her age. Her formative years were marked by her grandparents, whom she first portrayed as Clara del Valle and Esteban Trueba in The House of the Spirits. She left her grandparents’ home to live abroad with her mother and stepfather, a Chilean diplomat who had helped the family after Tomás Allende abandoned them in Peru. Tomás Allende disassociated himself completely from his wife and children, but his cousin, Salvador Allende, who in 1970 became president of Chile, maintained close ties with the family. As an adolescent, Isabel Allende found intellectual stimuli not so much in libraries but in the cultures of the various countries where her stepfather worked. Soon after returning to Chile at age fifteen, Allende met her future husband, Miguel Frías. Eventually the couple married, and Allende supported the home with her journalism while Frías finished his engineering degree. Later, Allende balanced

Clara lived in a universe of her own invention, protected from life’s inclement weather, where the prosaic truth of material objects mingled with the tumultuous reality of dreams and the laws of physics and logic did not always apply. Clara spent this time wrapped in her fantasies, accompanied by the spirits of the air, the water, and the earth. For nine years she was so happy that she felt no need to speak. —from The House of the Spirits (trans. Magda Bogin)

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her duties as a homemaker, a journalist, and a mother of two children, Paula and Nicolás. Although she admits that objectivity never came easy and her journalistic writing often reflected her own perspective, training in journalism did provide the important skill of seizing and holding the reader’s interest, essential also in fiction. Allende’s novels are rooted in personal experience. “The desire to write flares up inside me when I feel very strongly about something,” she has said, “I need to feel a very deep emotion.” After the bloody military coup in 1973 ousted Salvador Allende from the presidency, Isabel Allende continued her journalism 29

Isabel Allende

while clandestinely helping persecuted people leave the country. In 1975, this work became too dangerous, and Allende, along with her husband and children, left for Venezuela. The House of the Spirits was also spawned from the years she felt paralyzed by the emotional devastation of exile and family displacement. Beyond the tale of political repression, The House of the Spirits depicts Latin America’s heritage. Esteban Trueba, a selfmade man, becomes wealthy by exploiting landless peasants. Allende combines elements of realism and fantasy to present a portrait of Latin American existence, including a matriarchy sustained by generations of females knowledgeable in undermining male control. Allende’s second novel, Of Love and Shadows, continues her depiction of repression, torture, and death in Chile. The story focuses on the political killings of fifteen peasants that sparked international attention when their bodies were uncovered and the news was disclosed by the Catholic Church before the government could intervene. At that time, Allende’s main concern was “telling about my continent, getting across our truth.” Love, sorrow, violence, and death, frequently presented from a female’s point of view, are recurrent topics in Allende’s books. By 1987, when Eva Luna was published, Allende had divorced Frías, left Venezuela, and moved to California. The character Eva Luna suggests an incarnation of Allende herself, a storyteller, an orphan—symbolic of exile—and a female whose life consists of a series of adventures. In The Stories of Eva Luna, the reader gets to hear the stories which the protagonist of Eva Luna refers to in the novel but does not tell. Allende admits that she dislikes writing short stories and considers the genre a very difficult one that requires inspiration—something a writer does not control—more than the hard work and discipline for which she has trained herself. The Infinite Plan was Allende’s first novel not related to Latin America. Inspired by her second husband’s life and work in California among the Mexican American community, the novel focuses on Gregory Reeves, an Anglo who grows up in the barrio, escapes gang life, and pursues higher education. Reeves, like Allende’s husband, dedicates his legal skills to Latino families. 30

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The House of the Spirits The House of the Spirits (1982), Isabel Allende’s first novel, established the Chilean writer’s international reputation and remains her best-known work. Drawing on the Latin American literary style of Magical Realism, the book tells the story of the Trueba family and chronicles the social and political forces that affect the family’s fate. The story begins with Esteban Trueba and his marriage to Clara del Valle, a young woman who possesses clairvoyant gifts and communicates easily with the spirit world. Their marriage produces a daughter, Blanca, and twin sons. Esteban also fathers a son by one of the women on his family estate; years later his illegitimate grandson, a member of the secret police, will torture his legitimate granddaughter, Alba, a political prisoner. Esteban’s political ambitions take him to the country’s senate, where he opposes left-wing reform efforts, while Blanca’s affair with a burgeoning socialist results in Alba’s birth. A subsequent leftist victory is short-lived, however, and the elected government is deposed in a military coup. Alba is arrested and tortured before her grandfather can secure her release. In an effort to come to terms with all that has happened to her family, she sets about writing the book that will become The House of the Spirits. Allende’s novel has been compared to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) in its use of Magical Realism, which combines ordinary events with the fantastic to create vivid imagery. Allende maintains that much that seems incredible in the book is drawn from memories of her childhood. The characters of Esteban and Clara Trueba are based on her own maternal grandparents, and she began the book as a letter to her aging grandfather. The book’s political themes are also taken in part from Allende’s family history; her uncle was Salvador Allende, the Socialist president slain in Chile’s 1973 military coup. — Janet E. Lorenz

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Daughter of Fortune, set in the nineteenth century, is a novel about Eliza Sommers, a young woman who leaves her foster parents in Chile to find her lover, who has joined the California gold rush. Portrait in Sepia, published a year later, takes up the characters of Daughter of Fortune. Here, Eliza Sommers is a secondary personage as the grandmother of Aurora del Valle, whom she raises until the age of five and then parts from completely, leaving her in the care of Paulina del Valle. Aurora is a contemporary of and related to Clara del Valle from The House of the Spirits. Allende has referred to the three novels as a trilogy, but they are so only in the sense of having some overlapping characters and sharing as theme the exploration of women’s roles. The autobiographical Paula details Allende’s anguish as she sits at her dying daughter’s bedside in a Madrid hospital. During the year that Paula remains in a coma, Allende recounts the family history. The book ends with her daughter’s death on December 6, 1992, in Allende’s house in California. Allende’s own mother, besides being a best friend, edits her daughter’s manuscripts. The translations of Allende’s books into dozens of languages and the numerous literary as well as honorary awards recognize her stature among world authors. — Gisela Norat Learn More Allende, Isabel. “Isabel Allende.” http://www.isabelallende .com/. Accessed March 22, 2005. This bilingual website includes biographical information, a list of books, frequently asked questions (and answers), and more than three dozen family photos. _______. “Writing as an Act of Hope.” In Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel, edited by William Zinsser. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Allende gives insight into her use of politics in her novels and stories. Bloom, Harold, ed. Isabel Allende. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. Collection of essays examining genre and metarealism, the function of magic, female creativity, and other aspects of Allende’s writing. Includes an introductory essay by Bloom, a short biography, and a chronology. 32

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Cox, Karen Castellucci. Isabel Allende: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. An analysis of The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, The Infinite Plan, Daughter of Fortune, and Portrait in Sepia. Cox discusses the plot, character development, themes, style, and historical contexts of the these novels. She also provides an essay on Allende’s life and another essay describing common elements of Allende’s fiction. Feal, Rosemary G., and Yvette E. Miller. Isabel Allende Today: An Anthology of Essays. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Latin American Literary Review Press, 2002. Collection of essays focusing on Allende’s ability for storytelling. Includes essays by Linda Gould Levine, Z. Nelly Martinez, Eliana Rivero, and other critics. García Pinto, Magdalena, ed. Women Writers of Latin America: Intimate Histories. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Contains an excellent interview with Allende with a great deal of insight into the way she views her writing. It is here that Allende mentions that she sees herself as a troubadour going from village to village, person to person, talking about her country. Hart, Patricia. Narrative Magic in the Fiction of Isabel Allende. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1989. This book gives a clear and lucid discussion of Allende’s fiction, especially those elements of it identifiable as Magical Realism. Unfortunately, there are no translations for the Spanish quotations, but this is an extremely useful book. Hart, Stephen M. White Ink: Essays on Twentieth-Century Feminine Fiction in Spain and Latin America. London: Tamesis, 1993. Sets Allende’s work within the context of women’s writing in the twentieth century in Latin America. Examines the ways in which Allende fuses the space of the personal with that of the political in her fiction and shows that, in her work, falling in love with another human being is often aligned with falling in love with a political cause. Levine, Linda Gould. Isabel Allende. New York: Twayne, 2002. A volume from Twayne’s World Authors series. Includes bibliographical references and an index. 33

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Marketta, Laurila. “Isabel Allende and the Discourse of Exile.” In International Women’s Writing, New Landscapes of Identity, edited by Anne E. Brown and Marjanne E. Gooze. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. This book is helpful, both for Marketta’s analysis of Allende’s use of the language of exile and for other Allende materials in the collection. Ramblado-Minero, Mariá de la Cinta. Isabel Allende’s Writing of the Self: Trespassing the Boundaries of Fiction and Autobiography. Hispanic Literature 77. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 2003. Examines the autobiographical elements in Allende’s fiction, describing how she re-creates self identity in her works. Rodden, John. Conversations with Isabel Allende. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. This series of interviews provides new autobiographical material in addition to answering most questions readers may have about Allende’s work. Rojas, Sonia Riquelme, and Edna Aguirre Rehbein, eds. Critical Approaches to Isabel Allende’s Novels. New York: P. Lang, 1991. Features in-depth essays on Allende’s first three novels. Swanson, Philip. The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture After the Boom. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1995. Chapter 9 contains a discussion of the use of popular culture in Allende’s fiction, showing that the people and popular culture are seen to challenge official culture and patriarchy in her work. Also has a good introduction which sets Allende’s work in the context of other postboom novelists of Latin America. Williams, Raymond L. The Postmodern Novel in Latin America: Politics, Culture, and the Crisis of Truth. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Williams, one of Allende’s most vigorous critics, argues that Allende’s fiction simply imitates that of Gabriel García Márquez and that it is not postmodern in any real sense.

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Ignacio Manuel Altamirano Mexican novelist, journalist, and poet Born: Tixtla, Guerrero, Mexico; November 13, 1834 Died: San Remo, Italy; February 13, 1893 long fiction: Clemencia, 1869; La Navidad en las Montañas, 1870 (Christmas in the Mountains, 1961); El Zarco: Episodios de la vida Mexicana en 1861-1863, 1901 (El Zarco, the Bandit, 1957). short fiction: Cuentos de invierno, 1880; Paisajes y leyendas, tradiciones y costumbres de México, 1884. poetry: Rimas, 1864, 1871, 1880.

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eacher, politician, soldier, journalist, poet, novelist, literary inspirer of the young, and restorer of centers of learning, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (ihg-NAH-syoh ahl-tah-MEE-rahnoh) fills an epoch in the cultural life of Mexico. The spiritual development of Altamirano, considered Mexico’s greatest writer in his age, is an example of determination and genius. Of pure Indian blood, he was born in an obscure village in the southwest of Mexico; at the age of fourteen he still knew no Spanish. He began his studies at the Scientific and Literary Institute of

Although he was handsome and fair-skinned, with blue eyes—the colour known as zarco—and a strong slender body, his sullen expression and coarse language made little appeal to women, and no girl had ever shown any interest in him. . . . Without love himself he felt an insensate desire to defile and destroy the love he saw shared by others. —from El Zarco, the Bandit (trans. Mary Allt)

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El Zarco, the Bandit El Zarco, the Bandit (1901) is the story of how a young Mexican girl, Manuela, is seduced by the violent head of a group of bandits, El Zarco. Tired of her dull life, the young Manuela is excited by the romantic figure of El Zarco and ignores her mother’s choice, Nicolas, an Indian who is physically unattractive but hardworking, strong, and compassionate. El Zarco, who is blond and blue-eyed, has no useful skills except his ability to kill. Traditional colonial literature presents natives as a destructive entity; indigenous groups appear aligned with nature and are depicted as untamed forces. Here, however, El Zarco (whom the reader supposes to be of Spanish descent) is evil. At a time when European influence in Mexico was despised by peasants and light-skinned people were the targets of outlaws, the novel presents a struggle between two typical figures of the New World, the European newcomer and the indigenous laborer. Nicolas, unaware that El Zarco has been visiting Manuela furtively, expresses his desire to court her. Manuela, who like El Zarco is white, openly disdains Nicolas, whom she considers to be a dirty, ugly Indian. Nicolas finds love, however, in Manuela’s cousin Pilar, also an Indian and in love with him. Eventually they marry and Manuela dies in despair shortly after El Zarco has been caught and killed by a firing squad. With its emphasis on history as a means of understanding modern Mexico, El Zarco, the Bandit foreshadows the literature of the Mexican Revolution (19101920). Altamirano’s writing has a strong political and moral purpose. The message is clear: without a detailed account of all the forces involved in its formation, Mexican society may appear chaotic. Once patterns of behavior are established, however, it is obvious that Mexican society can be examined by objective means. — Rafael Ocasio

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Toluca, then the capital city of the state that contained his native village. In this city he learned Spanish, Latin, French, and philosophy, and he had as a teacher of literature the celebrated reformer Ignacio Ramírez, better known under his pseudonym, El Nigromante (The Necromancer). After teaching French at a private school in Toluca, he settled in Mexico City and studied at the College of Letrán. He interrupted his studies in order to ally himself with the Revolution of Ayutla, 1853-1855, against the dictator Santa Anna. Thereafter Altamirano returned to Mexico City to complete his courses in law. Again he took up arms during the War of Reform, and in 1861, after the triumph of the liberals, he was elected to the national Congress. During the French Intervention and the Second Empire he fought in the Republican ranks along with Benito Juárez. After the fall of Maximilian he devoted the rest of his life to teaching and to letters. Altamirano founded the weekly literary review El renacimiento (the renaissance) in 1869, in whose columns was brought about a reconciliation of Mexico’s conflicting political and literary factions: the conservative and the liberal, the neoclassic and the romantic. The pages of this publication were open to all genres and ideas. The short story, the novel, poetry, criticism, and history shook hands with one another and brought about a literary rebirth in Mexico that was to culminate in the Modernismo that marked the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The plots of Altamirano’s novels are generally straightforward and well-proportioned. The atmosphere in which they develop is intensely Mexican, completely localized within the provincial geography of the country. His characters, although moved by romantic motives, are nonetheless believable, sympathetic, and contrasted one with another. In Clemencia, set in the region of Guadalajara during the war of the French Intervention, Altamirano succeeds in creating a romantic novel of powerful native coloring. El Zarco, the Bandit, completed in 1888 but published posthumously in 1901, embodies his ideal of “national literature.” Set in the state of Morelos in the same period as Clemencia, during the peak of banditry in Mexico, it uses ro37


mance for nation-building purposes: A white girl who has read too much romantic literature spurns her mestizo suitor, who then finds his happiness in love with a mestizo girl. The white girl elopes with a blue-eyed zarco (bandit), only to regret it. The future of the country, then, lies in Mexico’s indigenous values. In Christmas in the Mountains, a short novel of idyllic atmosphere, Altamirano presents a simple and pleasing account of a Christmas spent in a village in the south of Mexico during the Civil War. Altamirano also wrote poetry; thirty-two poems written before 1867 were published in 1864, 1871, and 1880 under the title Rimas. These descriptive poems center on the rural landscapes of his childhood; their subjects and atmosphere indicate the poet’s deep preoccupation with the creation of a national literature. In 1889 Altamirano was named consul general in Spain and later in France. During a visit to Italy he became ill and went to San Remo to recover. He died there on February 13, 1893. His ashes were carried to Mexico City and placed in the Rotunda of Illustrious Men. — Emil Volek Learn More Nacci, Chris N. Ignacio Manuel Altamirano. New York: Twayne, 1970. A volume in the Twayne World Authors series. The dearth of studies in English on Altamirano is slightly offset by this elemental survey. Includes a bibliography. Read, John Lloyd. The Mexican Historical Novel, 1826-1910. 1939. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell, 1973. Includes a discussion of Altamirano’s work. Reyes, Lisa D. “The Nineteenth Century Latin American National Romance and the Role of Women.” Ariel 8 (1992). Focuses on the role of women. Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Includes an excellent commentary on Altamirano. Unzueta, Fernando. “The Nineteenth Century Novel: Toward a Public Sphere or a Mass Media?” In Latin American Literature 38


and Mass Media, edited by Edmundo Paz-Soldán and Debra A. Castillo. Hispanic Issues 22. New York: Garland, 2001. This analysis of El Periquillo Sarniento, a novel by José Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi, compares the novel to the work of his contemporary, Altamirano.

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Julia Alvarez Dominican American novelist and poet Born: New York, New York; March 27, 1950 poetry: Homecoming: Poems, 1984 (revised and expanded as Homecoming: New and Collected Poems, 1996); The Other Side/El otro lado, 1995; Seven Trees, 1998; Cry Out: Poets Protest the War, 2003 (multiple authors); The Woman I Kept to Myself, 2004. long fiction: How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, 1991; In the Time of the Butterflies, 1994; ¡Yo!, 1997 (sequel to How the García Girls Lost Their Accents); In the Name of Salomé, 2000; The Cafecito Story, 2001. nonfiction: Something to Declare, 1998. children’s literature: The Secret Footprints, 2000; How Tía Lola Came to Stay, 2001; Before We Were Free, 2002; Finding Miracles, 2004. edited text: Old Age Ain’t for Sissies, 1979.

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lthough she was born in the United States, Julia Alvarez (HOO-lee-ah AHL-vah-rehz) spent her formative years in the Dominican Republic, having moved there with her parents when she was less than a month old. In her parents’ native land, during her first decade of life, Alvarez was immersed in a rich culture through her exposure to an enormous extended family. Her father, the twenty-fifth legitimate child of her grandfather, not only had many sisters and brothers but also countless halfsisters and half-brothers, the fruits of his father’s extensive liaisons. The family, many of its members living in close proximity to one another, was a warm if somewhat unwieldy group whom Alvarez describes as being “shabbily genteel.” They, along with their servants (who in most cases had been with the family for years and were regarded almost as family), were inveterate storytellers. One of their greatest pleasures was to gather for family meals or family vacations, in the course of which they amused

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one another by weaving yarns, both fictional and real, to the delight of all who heard them. Alvarez, growing up in such an atmosphere, developed an early affinity for writing. Living on their properties two hours out of the capital, the Alvarez family came under increasing political pressure from the regime of Generalisimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, the dictator who seized power in 1930 and became increasingly despotic as his reign continued. The Alvarezes had at first been tolerated by the Trujillo regime because the family appeared apolitical. (Julia’s grandfather had been the Dominican Republic’s delegate to the United Nations.) Her father, a physician, joined in a plot to overthrow Trujillo. After his involvement in this plot became known, he escaped the country with his family in August, 1960, shortly before certain arrest and possible execution for his subversive activities. The second of her parents’ four daughters, Julia was ten when she was abruptly uprooted, leaving a traditional Dominican culture in which the men went to work every day while the women, attended by servants, remained at home to raise their children. When the family arrived in New York, her father was not licensed to practice medicine in the United States (although after several years he was able to resume his profession), so they were suddenly reduced to a hand-to-mouth existence in a strange culture; a small, grubby apartment in Queens was their new home.

“The point is,” he concluded, “‘ La vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son.’” He stood by the window and watched Mami watering her fussy bushes as if she could flush roses out of them. “My father,” he turned to me, “used to say that to my mother: ‘Life is a dream, Maurán, and dreams are dreams.’” —from “El Doctor”

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Alvarez relates much of their struggle in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, a story that deals with another matter close to the author’s heart. One of the teachers in a Catholic school she attended in New York recognized Alvarez’s ability to use language well and encouraged her to master English. Alvarez did so but in the process began speaking Spanish with an American accent, which made her feel alienated from her roots, especially when, after Trujillo’s assassination, she traveled back to the Dominican Republic. Having ceased to speak Spanish as native speakers of the language do, she rankled at this loss that made her feel separated from her Dominican roots. Linguistic concerns are central to much of Alvarez’s thinking and writing. Her mother, educated at a boarding school in Boston during the 1940’s, spoke English well, although her father never used the language easily. Alvarez touches on language and its implications in several of her books, including ¡Yo! and Something to Declare. When discussing mature topics, she is most comfortable using English because when she was growing up, she was used to hearing English spoken when people talked about secretive matters or about adult topics. Alvarez’s earliest formal education was in the Dominican Republic at the Carol Morgan School, an establishment run by an American missionary who was a friend of her family. When the family moved to the United States, Alvarez attended public and parochial schools before entering Abbot Academy, a New England boarding school. At seventeen, she entered Connecticut College in New London, remaining there for two years before transferring in 1969 to Middlebury College in Vermont, from which she received a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in 1971. Alvarez expressed an early desire to be a poet, and her interest in writing never waned. She enrolled in the creative writing program at Syracuse University and, in 1975, received a master’s degree in creative writing from that institution. She then embarked on a two-year stint of running poetry workshops in nursing homes, schools, and prisons under the auspices of the Kentucky Arts Commission. Out of this experience grew the opportunity for Alvarez to run poetry workshops for the elderly in 43

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How the García Girls Lost Their Accents Set in New York City and the Dominican Republic, Julia Alvarez’s novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) traces the lives of the four García sisters—Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia—as they struggle to understand themselves and their cross-cultural identities. The novel is structured in three parts: 1989-1972, 1970-1960, and 1960-1956. The third part of the novel narrates the Garcías’ flight from their homeland and its political problems. When the Garcías emigrate to the United States, they plan to stay only until the situation in their homeland improves, and the sisters struggle to acclimate themselves to their new environment. The second part of the novel traces the sisters’ formative years in the United States. In addition, part 2 narrates the García girls’ summer trips to the Dominican Republic. During these trips the García sisters realize that although they face great struggles as immigrants, they have much more freedom as young women in the United States than they do in the Dominican Republic. Part 1 of the novel begins with Yolanda, who is known as the family poet, returning to the Dominican Republic as an adult. She discovers that the situation in her country has not changed. When she wants to travel to the coast alone, her relatives warn her against it. In this first part readers learn about the girls’ young adult lives, primarily about their sexual awareness, relationships, and marriages. Virginity is a primary issue, for the sisters’ traditions and customs haunt them as they negotiate their sexual awakenings throughout their college years in the United States. It is in this first part that readers learn precisely how Americanized the García girls have become, and the rest of the novel focuses on how they have gradually lost their “accents.” — Angela Athy

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North Carolina. During the summers of 1979 and 1980, she attended the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Ripton, Vermont, which is sponsored by nearby Middlebury College. In 1979 she accepted a position teaching English at the Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts, where she remained for two years. A summer residency in fiction from Yaddo, the noted writers’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, enabled Alvarez to concentrate fully on her writing. This was followed by a two-year teaching position as a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Vermont in Burlington. For the 1984 academic year, Alvarez was the Jenny McKean Moore Visiting Writer at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The appearance of her first book of poems, Homecoming, in 1984 paved the way for her appointment to an assistant professorship in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985, a position she held until 1988, when she moved to Middlebury College to teach literature and creative writing. She held this position, rising to the rank of full professor, and became writer-in-residence there. In 1989, Alvarez married Bill Eichner, an ophthalmologist, with whom she settled on a farm close to Middlebury. The couple became owners of a coffee plantation in the Dominican Republic, and on its grounds Alvarez and Eichner built a school to provide an education for the workers’ children. Alvarez entered the most productive period of her creative life following her marriage to Eichner. Her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, was a critical success and was awarded the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles award for excellence in literature. This novel was followed in 1994 by an important work of historical fiction, In the Time of the Butterflies, the chilling story of how Generalisimo Trujillo, rebuffed when he makes sexual advances toward a young, virginal girl who is a member of the prominent Mirabel family, has his vengeance, which results in the deaths of three of the four daughters of that family. This novel was made into a movie in 2001. Alvarez’s first children’s book, The Secret Footprints, was followed by How Tía Lola Came to Stay. Her third children’s book, 45

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Before We Were Free, again touches on the despotism of the Trujillo regime, this time seeking to inform a youthful audience of some of the excesses of the period from 1930 to Trujillo’s assassination in 1961. — R. Baird Shuman Learn More Alvarez, Julia. “Julia Alvarez.” http://www.alvarezjulia.com/. Accessed March 22, 2005. The author’s website contains a list of books, articles, and interviews, scheduled appearances and biographical information. Bing, Jonathan. “Julia Alvarez: Books That Cross Borders.” Publishers Weekly 243 (December 16, 1996). A concise view of Alvarez’s writing, dealing mostly with In the Time of the Butterflies and Homecoming. Henao, Eda B. The Colonial Subject’s Search for Nation, Culture, and Identity in the Works of Julia Alvarez, Rosario Ferré, and Ana Lydia Vega. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 2003. Examines fiction written in English and Spanish by women writers from the Dominican Republican and the Puerto Rican cultures. Describes how these writers’ works challenge traditional and stereotypical assumptions about the representation of women. Lyons, Bonnie, and Bill Oliver. “A Clean Windshield: An Interview with Julia Alvarez.” In Passion and Craft: Conversations with Notable Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Alvarez deals with the effect that Dominican politics had upon her writing. She discusses her Dominican upbringing. Mujcinovic, Fatima. Postmodern Cross-culturalism and Politicization in U.S. Latina Literature: From Ana Castillo to Julia Alverez. Modern American Literature 42. New York: P. Lang, 2004. A literary and cultural analysis of the work of Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and Dominican American women writers, including Alvarez. Mujcinovic views these writers’ work from a contemporary feminist, political, postcolonial, and psychoanalytical perspective. Ortiz-Marquez, Maribel. “From Third World Politics to First World Practices: Contemporary Latina Writers in the United States.” In Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World 46

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Women’s Literature and Film, edited by Ghosh Bishmupriya and Bose Brinda. New York: Garland, 1997. Places In the Time of the Butterflies in a political context. Postlewate, Marisa Herrera. How and Why I Write: Redefining Hispanic Women’s Writing and Experience. Currents in Comparative Romance Language and Literature 131. New York: P. Lang, 2003. Analyzes the works of Alvarez and three other Hispanic women writers to describe how their work redefines autobiographical writing. Sirias, Silvio. Julia Alvarez: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. This compact volume offers an excellent concise overview of the body of Alvarez’s writing.

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Jorge Amado Brazilian novelist Born: Near Ilhéus, Bahia, Brazil; August 10, 1912 Died: Salvador, Bahia, Brazil; August 6, 2001 long fiction: O país do carnaval, 1931; Cacáu, 1933; Suor, 1934; Jubiabá, 1935; Mar morto, 1936; Capitães da areia, 1937 (Captains of the Sand, 1988); Terras do sem fim, 1942 (The Violent Land, 1945); São Jorge dos Ilhéus, 1944 (The Golden Harvest, 1992); Seara vermelha, 1946; Os subterrâneos da liberdade, 1954 (includes Agonia da noite, A luz no túnel, and Os ásperos tempos); Gabriela, cravo e canela, 1958 (Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, 1962); Os vehlos marinheiros, 1961 (includes A morte e a morte de Quincas Berro Dágua [The Two Deaths of Quincas Wateryell, 1965] and A completa verdade sôbre as discutidas aventuras do Comandante Vasco Moscoso de Aragão, capitão de longo curso [Home Is the Sailor, 1964]); Os pastores da noite, 1964 (Shepherds of the Night, 1967); Dona Flor e seus dois maridos, 1966 (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, 1969); Tenda dos milagres, 1969 (Tent of Miracles, 1971); Tereza Batista cansada de guerra, 1972 (Tereza Batista: Home from the Wars, 1975); Tiêta do Agreste, 1977 (Tieta, the Goat Girl, 1979); Farda fardão, camisola de dormir, 1979 (Pen, Sword, Camisole, 1985); Tocaia Grande: A face obscura, 1984 (Showdown, 1988); O sumiço da santa: Una história de feitiçaria, 1988 (The War of the Saints, 1993); A descoberta da América pelos Turcos, 1994; Capitán de altura, 2000. drama: O amor de Castro Alves, pb. 1947 (also known as O amor do soldado). poetry: A estrada do mar, 1938. nonfiction: ABC de Castro Alves, 1941 (biography); Vida de Luíz Carlos Prestes, 1942; O cavaleiro da esperança, 1945 (biography); Bahia de todos os santos, 1945 (travel sketch); Guia das ruas e dos misterios da cidade do Salvador, 1945; Homens e coisas do Partido Comunista, 1946; O mundo da paz, 1951 (travel sketch); União Soviética e democracias populares, 1951; Bahia boa terra Bahia, 48

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1967; Bahia, 1971 (English translation, 1971); O menino grapiúna, 1981; Navega ção de Cabotagem, 1992. children’s literature: O gato malhado e a andorinha sinhá: Uma historia de amor, 1976 (The Swallow and the Tom Cat: A Love Story, 1982).

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orge Amado (HOR-hay uh-MAH-doo) was Brazil’s most popular twentieth century novelist. He was born in the municipality of Itabuna in the cacao region of southern Bahia. His father was a cacao planter who lost his first plantation in a flood in 1914 but later was sufficiently successful in the business to send his son to boarding schools, first in the state capital of Salvador and later in the (then) national capital, Rio de Janeiro. Amado was not a good student—though he liked to read and write—but he eventually managed to complete a law degree, the diploma for which he never bothered to claim. By the time he had completed his studies, in fact, he had already worked as a reporter, joined a bohemian group called the Academy of Rebels, and published two novels. In his second novel, Cacáu, Amado abandoned the rather pretentious intellectualism of his first work and turned to his memories of life on the cacao plantation as the basis for his fiction. In his third novel, Suor, he portrayed urban slum dwellers in the city of Salvador. These two locales, the lawless frontier of the cacao planters and the milieu of the lower social strata of Brazil’s oldest city, are particularly important to Amado’s canon. His first novels are neither pleasant memories of a childhood gone by nor picturesque glimpses of colorful folk—Amado was clearly an angry young man, a fact the Brazilian government recognized several times in the 1930’s by burning his books in public and sending their author to jail and even into exile. Amado returned to Brazil in 1945 at the end of the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas. In that same year, he married Zélia Gattai, with whom he would have two children. He was also elected to the Brazilian Congress that year, running on the ticket of the Brazilian Communist Party. The Party operated openly and legally only for a brief period, however, and within two years Amado was again in exile, first in 49

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He was alone again on the bench. He no longer felt the comfort of the sun. He thought of the old days when such things were easily settled. If someone stood in his way, all he had to do was send for a trigger man, promise him money, and mention the person’s name. Now it was different. —from Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (trans. James L. Taylor and William Grossman)

Paris and later in Prague, where his daughter Paloma was born. In 1951, he won the Stalin Peace Prize. Amado’s leftist sympathies were largely undisguised in the early works, which display increasing skill in evoking scene and sentiment and progressively more elaborate narrative structures. His political commitment reached its peak in the trilogy Os subterrâneos da liberdade (the freedom underground), a work of considerable narrative skill whose art is diluted by a tendentious quality which many readers found irritating. The first volume of the work was published in 1954, when Amado returned to Brazil from his exile. In 1958, he published Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, which many critics considered a watershed work in his canon. It is a convoluted and dramatic narrative that not only lacks but also undermines the righteous tone of some of the earlier works. It purports to be no more than a “chronicle of a town in the interior,” and its narrator appears to be as bemused by the goings-on as many readers are likely to be. This work marks the beginning of the quintessential Amado, a gifted narrative craftsman with a keen eye and a finely tuned ear who could turn the minor triumphs and traumas of Brazil’s lower social registers into something that might be called high comic melodrama. Certain features of this “new” Amado were present in even the earliest works, but Amado’s novels published after 1958 are all essentially comic. They are also all set either in the state of Bahia or in the city of Salvador, whose magical quality Amado 50

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exploits in the manner New Orleans writers exploit the special character of their city. Bahia is not only Brazil’s oldest city, it is also the most African—and it is tropical. The setting means that the scene is exotic even to most Brazilians, and Amado takes full advantage of the otherness implicit in that fact to fashion stories that could have taken place only in such surroundings. Many of his later novels feature direct intervention in events by African deities. Although the overt political element seems largely absent from the later novels, the ethical bent of the later works is expressed in terms of hostility to propriety and contempt for the establishment. Earlier Amadian heroes and heroines were angry rebels and innocent victims—the later ones are rather more like gleeful subversives. In Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, the heroine manages to find happiness by having two husbands— one of them is dead, to be sure, but he nevertheless remains remarkably lusty after death. In Tieta, the Goat Girl, yet another heroine (heroines outnumber heroes in these works) uses money earned in prostitution to save the ecosystem and sagging economy of her hometown, providing lessons on life and love along the way. After 1952, Amado lived in a charming but unpretentious house in Salvador. He did much of his writing in the homes of friends elsewhere in Brazil and in Portugal, however, because his residence became a tourist attraction. Brazil’s most prolific writer of best-sellers, he also became something of a rarity in Brazilian society in another sense: He was a writer who lived solely by writing. In 1961, Amado was seated in the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He died in 2001 just before his eighty-ninth birthday. Amado was sometimes criticized for being too facile a writer, for his blatant leftism, for his fondness for amoral or even immoral acts and characters, and even for being racist and sexist. Not much of this criticism stands up to close scrutiny, however, and some seems inspired solely by the belief that anybody who sells so many books cannot be worth much as a writer. No author in Brazil offers a serious challenge to his popularity at home, and his works in translation have sold well (and at times spectac52

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The War of the Saints In The War of the Saints (1988), Amado creates a tale of Magical Realism that reverberates with the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of a carnival. The novel opens with the description of a statue of Saint Barbara of the Thunder, famed for her eternal beauty and miraculous powers. The statue has just been transported from the altar of a provincial church across the Bay of All Saints to Bahia for an exhibition of religious art. Soon after the ship docks, the statue takes life and disappears into the crowd. The icon is transformed into the living African deity Saint Barbara Yansan. The novel recounts the magical events of the next forty-eight hours. If the mulatto culture of this part of Brazil, which is based on the mixture of Roman Catholicism and West African animism, is the underlying subject of the novel, it is clear that the author’s sympathy lies nearly entirely with the latter religion. Candomblé, an African Brazilian religious ceremony partly of Yoruban origin, is the book’s true protagonist and winner in the cultural struggle depicted in the novel. Saint Barbara Yansan has come to rescue Manela, a young girl who is in love with a taxi driver named Miro, from the puritanical clutches of her devoutly Catholic aunt, Adalgisa. Being a goddess, Saint Barbara naturally succeeds. Along the way, she permits her humble servant, the author, to create a riotously satiric epic that pokes fun at critics and professors, Marxists and fascists, generals and judges, priests, politicians, and policemen—in short, anyone with any power in Brazil. Concurrently, however, Amado paints a loving portrait of Bahia’s powerless, particularly artists, poets, musicians, lovers, and the priests and priestesses of Candomblé. The book is a consummate celebration of life amid misery, and it is unabashedly triumphant. — Harold Branam

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ularly) in the forty-odd languages in which they are available. This success may indicate that a well-wrought narrative, whatever malice it may express toward political or moral convention, has appeal to a broad segment of the international reading public. No Brazilian writer of the twentieth century did as much to give new life to the concept of the pleasure of the text, and few writers of any nationality rival him as an original and productive fabulist. — Jon S. Vincent and Genevieve Slomski Learn More Armstrong, Piers. Third World Literary Fortunes: Brazilian Culture and Its International Reception. Lewisberg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1999. Examines the domestic and international receptions of Amado, Mário de Andrade, and other Brazilian writers. Contrasts Amado, who celebrates negritude and has been successful in turning Brazilian popular culture into literature, with João Guimarães Rosa, known as the “Brazilian James Joyce.” Bower, Keith H., Earl E. Fitz, and Enrique Martínez-Vidal, eds. Jorge Amado: New Critical Essays. New York: Routledge, 2001. Collection of essays analyzing Amado’s work. Brookshaw, David. Race and Color in Brazilian Literature. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1986. Detects racial stereotyping and prejudice in the characterization of blacks in Jubiabá, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, and Tent of Miracles. Includes a bibliography. Chamberlain, Bobby J. Jorge Amado. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Provides excellent and detailed analysis of Amado’s later works of fiction. Discusses Amado as a writer, social critic, and politician and places Amado’s works in social, political, and historical context. Concluding chapter discusses the author’s contradictory status as a man of letters and a literary hack. Contains biographical information, chronology, and bibliography. Lowe, Elizabeth. The City in Brazilian Literature. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982. Characterizes Amado’s depiction of Salvador, Bahia, as “picturesque exoti54

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cism,” and his portrayal of urban poor as “carnivalization.” Contains a bibliography. Patai, Daphne. Myth and Ideology in Contemporary Brazilian Fiction. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983. Chapter 5 is a critique of Tereza Batista, which Patai feels undercuts itself ideologically. She criticizes Amado for his use of the supernatural, for his use of humor, which she feels trivializes social injustice, and for what she regards as his patronizing view of the poor. In her view, Amado’s work blurs the distinction between history and fiction. Includes bibliography. Pescatello, Ann. “The Brazileira: Images and Realities in the Writings of Machado de Assis and Jorge Amado.” In Female and Male in Latin America: Essays, edited by Pescatello. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973. Compares and contrasts female characters in several of Amado’s major novels with those of Machado de Assis. Detects a preoccupation with race and class in both writers’ female characterizations. Includes a bibliography.

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Rudolfo A. Anaya Mexican American novelist Born: Pastura, New Mexico; October 30, 1937 Also known as: Rudolfo Alfonso Anaya long fiction: Bless Me, Ultima, 1972; Heart of Aztlán, 1976; Tortuga, 1979; The Legend of La Llorona, 1984; Lord of the Dawn: The Legend of Quetzalcóatl, 1987; Alburquerque, 1992; Zia Summer, 1995; Jalamanta: A Message from the Desert, 1996; Rio Grande Fall, 1996; Shaman Winter, 1999; Jemez Spring, 2005. short fiction: The Silence of the Llano, 1982; Serafina’s Stories, 2004. drama: The Season of La Llorona, pr. 1979; Who Killed Don José?, pr. 1987; Billy the Kid, pb. 1995. screenplay: Bilingualism: Promise for Tomorrow, 1976. poetry: The Adventures of Juan Chicaspatas, 1985 (epic poem); Elegy on the Death of Cesar Chávez, 2000 (juvenile). nonfiction: A Chicano in China, 1986; Conversations with Rudolfo Anaya, 1998. children’s literature: The Farolitos of Christmas: A New Mexico Christmas Story, 1987, 1995 (illustrated edition); Maya’s Children: The Story of La Llorona, 1997; Farolitos for Abuelo, 1998; My Land Sings: Stories from the Rio Grande, 1999; Roadrunner’s Dance, 2000; The Santero’s Miracle: A Bilingual Story, 2004 (illustrated by Amy Cordova, Spanish translation by Enrique Lamadrid). edited texts: Voices from the Rio Grande, 1976; Cuentos Chicanos: A Short Story Anthology, 1980 (with Antonio Márquez); A Ceremony of Brotherhood, 1680-1980, 1981 (with Simon Ortiz); Voces: An Anthology of Nuevo Mexicano Writers, 1987; Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland, 1989; Tierra: Contemporary Short Fiction of New Mexico, 1989. miscellaneous: The Anaya Reader, 1995. 56

Rudolfo A. Anaya

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udolfo Alfonso Anaya (rew-DOHL-foh ahl-FOHS-soh ahNAH-yah) was born in the small village of Pastura, New Mexico, in 1937 to Martin and Rafaelita (Mares) Anaya. His father was a laborer. Anaya’s inspiration to become a writer came at an early age when he listened to his family telling stories. After graduating from the University of New Mexico in 1963, Anaya taught in public schools for seven years. He earned an M.A. in English in 1968 and an M.A. in counseling in 1972. He became director of counseling at the University of Albuquerque from 1971 to 1973, leaving that position to teach in the Department of English at the University of New Mexico, where he remained until he resigned that position to devote all of his time to writing in 1993. Anaya’s first novel, Bless Me, Ultima, published in 1972, is an autobiographical work, a Bildungsroman that depicts a formative period in the life of the main character, Antonio. The mysterious healer Ultima is at the heart of this novel, in which the seven-year-old boy Antonio is searching for a spiritual foundation and values that will enable him to better cope with a world racked by conflict, violence, and death. Disenchanted with a Catholicism that seems dogmatic and harsh, he learns from the aged Ultima, a curandera (healer), an alternative outlook on life, curanderismo, that includes a love of nature, a belief in the supernatural, and the need to choose good over evil. Anaya has revealed that the disenchantment with Catholi-

“So he is dark,” Sara said. A dark and handsome Mexicano was her son’s father, an indio like Ramiro, a dark, curly-haired árabe. She looked at her son and admired him. Yes, he would find his father, it was best to believe that. He had been bound by destiny long enough, now he had to break those old ropes and create his own future. —from Alburquerque

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cism that Antonio experiences was exactly what he experienced as a youth, and that he, too, was attracted to paganistic religion as an alternative to the dogmatic Catholic religion in which he was raised. Through his protagonist Antonio, Anaya is pondering fundamental existential issues: the meaning of good and evil, one’s purpose in life, whether God exists, and the nature of the sacred. Anaya’s reputation is largely the result of the critical and popular acclaim for this first autobiographical novel. After growing up in Pastura and later in Santa Rosa, Anaya and his family moved to Albuquerque in 1952, where they lived in the barrio Barelas, the setting for his second novel. Heart of Aztlán might be viewed as primarily a social protest novel. The novel focuses on the problems of a Chicano family that moves to the barrio of Barelas in Albuquerque. Anaya’s subsequent novels continue his fascination with his personal New Mexican background and the mythic nature of his rich oral tradition. His own near-fatal accident and treatment for a spinal injury at Tingley Hospital in New Mexico provide the background for Tortuga. This book recounts the story of the adolescent protagonist’s recovery from a serious accident that results in his being encased in a body cast, somewhat like a turtle’s shell (tortuga is the Spanish word for turtle). Alburquerque revolves around the search of Abrán González, a mixedblood hero of the barrio, for his biological father. In the course of the complicated plot, Abrán comes into contact with different social classes, and Albuquerque becomes symbolic of American society. In Zia Summer, Anaya chose the popular genre of the murder mystery to express his moral vision. In this novel, his hero is a private detective who is investigating the murder of his cousin. As in all of Anaya’s previous novels, Zia Summer presents the archetypal battle between good and evil. Anaya is not only a widely read author within the Mexican American community but also one of the few Chicano writers to enter the mainstream and be read by a large public. Bless Me, Ultima is considered a contemporary classic and is frequently taught in secondary schools and universities. Anaya is one of the founders of Chicano literature. — Laura M. Chavkin 59

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Bless Me, Ultima Bless Me, Ultima (1972) is the first novel of a trilogy that also includes Heart of Aztlán (1976) and Tortuga (1979). It is a psychological and magical portrait of a child, Antonio, who is subjected to contradicting influences that he must master in order to mature. These influences include symbolic characters and places, the most powerful of which are Ultima, a curandera who evokes the pre-Columbian world, and a golden carp that swims the river waters of the supernatural. Antonio is born in Pasturas, a very small village on the Eastern New Mexican plain. Later, the family moves across the river to the small town of Guadalupe, where Antonio spends his childhood. Antonio’s father wants him to become a horseman of the plain. Antonio’s mother wants him to become a priest to a farming community, the highest tradition in her family. The parents’ wishes are symptoms of a deeper spiritual challenge facing Antonio involving his Catholic beliefs and those associated with the magical world of a preColumbian past. Ultima, the curandera and a creature of both worlds, helps guide Antonio as he deals with these challenges. Ultima is a magical character. She supervised his birth, and comes to stay with the family in Guadalupe when Antonio is seven. On several occasions, Antonio is a witness to her power. Antonio’s adventure takes him beyond the divided world of the farmer and the horseman and beyond Catholicism’s rituals and depictions of good and evil. With Ultima’s help, he is able to bridge these opposites and channel them into a cosmic vision of nature, represented by the river, which stands in the middle of his two worlds, and by the golden carp, which points to a new spiritual covenant. The novel ends with the killing of Ultima’s owl by one of her enemies, who discovered that the owl carried her spirit. This causes Ultima’s death, but her work is done. Antonio can choose his destiny. — David Conde

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Learn More Baeza, Abelardo. Man of Aztlán: A Biography of Rudolfo Anaya. Austin, Tex.: Eakin Press, 2001. This concise biography offers a fresh look at the man behind the classic novels. Includes bibliographical references. Dick, Bruce, and Silvio Sirias, eds. Conversations with Rudolfo Anaya. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1998. Aimed at students and general readers, this book is designed to present Anaya’s point of view and philosophy. Includes index. Fernández Olmos, Margarite. Rudolfo A. Anaya: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Geuder, Ann-Catherine. “Marketing Mystical Mysteries: Rudolfo Anaya’s Mystery Trilogy.” In Sleuthing Ethnicity: The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction, edited by Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Monika Mueller. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003. Analyzes Anaya’s three mystery novels: Zia Summer, Rio Grande Fall, and Shaman Winter. González-T., César A., ed. Rudolfo A. Anaya: Focus on Criticism. La Jolla, Calif.: Lalo Press, 1990. Mainly for specialists. The author is an eminent scholar and critic of Anaya. Contains select bibliography and an index. González-T., César A., and Phyllis S. Morgan. A Sense of Place: Rudolfo A. Anaya, an Annotated Bio-bibliography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Includes maps by Ronald L. Stauber. Klein, Dianne. “Coming of Age in Novels by Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra Cisneros.” The English Journal 81 (September, 1992). Focuses on initiation into adulthood. An insightful comparative study. Martínez, Julio, and Francisco A. Lomelí. Chicano Literature: A Readers’ Guide. New York: Greenwood Press, 1985. A good starting point for determining Anaya’s place in Chicano literature. Includes biographical essays on Anaya and other Chicano authors. Serrano, Julio Cañero. “Politics of ‘Chingando’: Chicano Political Misrepresentation in Heart of Aztlán and Alburquerque.” In (Mis)Representations: Intersections of Culture and Power, edited by 61

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Férnando Galván, Julio Cañero Serrano, Fernández Vázquez, and José Santiago. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2003. Analyzes the treatment of Mexican American identity in two of Anaya’s works. Tatum, Charles M. Chicano Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Provides an excellent perspective on the evolution of Chicano literature, especially in the 1970’s, when Anaya came into prominence. Includes summaries of his works. Varvel, Linda. “Censorship and Bless Me, Ultima: A Journey Through Fear to Understanding.” In Censored Books II: Critical Viewpoints, 1985-2000, edited by Nicholas J. Karolides. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2000. Discusses how the novel was censored. Vasallo, Paul, ed. The Magic of Words: Rudolfo Anaya and His Writings. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. Provides an excellent reading and discussion of Anaya’s early literary work.

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Mário de Andrade Brazilian poet, essayist, and ethnomusicologist Born: São Paulo, Brazil; October 9, 1893 Died: São Paulo, Brazil; February 25, 1945 Also known as: Mário Raul de Morais Andrade long fiction: Amar, verbo intransitivo, 1927 (Fräulein, 1933); Macunaíma: O, Heroi sem nenhum caracter, 1928 (English translation, 1984). short fiction: Belazarte, 1934; Contos novos, 1946. poetry: Há una gota de sangue em cada poema, 1917; Paulicéia desvairada, 1922 (Hallucinated City, 1968); Losango cáqui, 1926; Cla do jaboti, 1927; Remate de males, 1930; Lira paulistana, 1946; Poesias completas, 1955. nonfiction: A escrava que nao é Isaura, 1925 (criticism); Ensaio sobre a música brasileira, 1928; Música, doce música, 1933; Aspectos da literatura Brasileira, 1943 (criticism); Popular Music and Song in Brazil, 1943; O empalhador de passarinho, 1944 (criticism); Danças dramáticas do Brasil, 1959; Aspectos da música brasileira, 1965. miscellaneous: Obras completas, 1959-1976 (20 volumes).

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ário de Andrade (MAH-ree-oh thay ahn-DRAH-thay) is regarded as the consummate writer of twentieth century Brazil for the breadth of his creative, critical, and investigatory work. His spiritual leadership placed him at the forefront of Brazilian Modernism. Andrade lived all his life in Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo, where he studied, worked, and founded several important cultural institutions. He received a classical Catholic secondary education and took a degree in piano from the São Paulo Conservatory in 1917, the same year he published his first book of poems, which reflect on the pain and suffering of World War I. In the early 1920’s Andrade became an advocate of literary renovation. In 1922 he was a principal figure in the polemical 63

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Week of Modern Art, which officially launched artistic Modernismo in Brazil. As a collaborator in literary reviews, a creative author, and an essayist, Andrade was essential to the development of the literary movement that championed the use of natural language and national cultural awareness as well as formal innovation in the light of changes in European literatures. In 1922 he published the combative volume of poetry Hallucinated City, an extravagant free-verse collection that celebrated the Brazilian urban experience and mocked staid traditionalists. He formalized his arguments for change in subsequent influential essays. In 1924 Andrade became professor of musical history at the São Paulo Conservatory, a position he maintained while pursuing literary interests. He took numerous research trips around Brazil, on which he absorbed the colonial heritage and explored the vast and rich systems of folk culture in the northern regions of the country. The 1927 collection of poetry Cla do jaboti (a tribal clan) reflects this characteristic preoccupation with folk traditions and nonacademic, popular language. The author’s broad ethnographic knowledge and his philosophy of “Brazilian-ness” emerge in what is often regarded as his most important work, Macunaíma. First called a story, then a novel, and finally a rhapsody, this unusual work of fiction is subtitled “the hero with no character,” a phrase that connects the author’s literary concern with the multifaceted Brazilian cultural identity. In the elaboration of this pseudo-epic, Andrade draws on the legends and myths of Amazonian natives, AfroBrazilian folklore, and a vivid imagination. Rejecting the spirit of normative linguistic practice, the author blends all manners of speech and parodies the gap between official written Portuguese and the actual forms used by the people, educated and uneducated alike. At the same time he questions the Eurocentric view that dominated New World thinking. Establishment critics were perplexed by the work when it appeared, and it remained unappreciated for many years until later readers came to regard it as a central contribution to Brazilian Modernismo and as a landmark in New World literature. In the 1930’s Andrade was noted for outstanding achievements in teaching and cultural development. He sat on the 64

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São Paulo! tumult of my life . . . My loves are flowers made from the original . . . Harlequinate! . . . Diamond tights . . . Gray and gold . . . Light and mist . . . Oven and warm winter . . . Subtle refinements without scandals, without jealousy . . . Perfumes from Paris . . . Arys! Lyrical slaps in the Trianon . . . Cotton field! . . . —from “Inspiration” (trans. Jack E. Tomlins)

commission charged with reforming the National School of Music, where he helped to organize the first congress focusing on the employment of Brazilian Portuguese in erudite vocal music. Andrade’s essay on this topic is one of the many studies he published on classical, popular, and folk music. He was director of the municipal department of cultural affairs of São Paulo, where he created the first children’s parks as well as the Municipal Archive of Sound Recordings, an important research source. Andrade also conceived a law establishing the National Service for Historical and Artistic Patrimony, and he declared the first historical monuments in São Paulo in 1936. The following year he founded the Brazilian Society for Ethnography and Folklore. His pioneering research and writing earned for him recognition as the first ethnomusicologist in Brazil. As for academic contributions, Andrade was instrumental in bringing the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to teach and do research in Brazil. Andrade taught aesthetics from 1938 to 1939 at the University of the Federal District, Rio de Janeiro, where he was a high-ranking official of the National Book Institute and a major force behind the development of the first encyclopedia of Brazilian affairs. Andrade undertook further travels around Brazil in the 1940’s, but he returned to São Paulo, where he labored indefatigably until his sudden death. He left much research, several critical essays, and many creative pieces unpublished. The collected 65

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Macunaíma Macunaíma (1928) is a fantasy drawn from Amazonian Indian mythology, Afro-Luso-Brazilian folklore, and the author’s imagination. Much of what occurs is fablelike, magical, or illogical, with no spatial or temporal bounds. The action centers on the struggle of the hero, Macunaíma, to recover a magical amulet given to him by Ci, the Mother of the Forest. His adventures take him to all corners of Brazil and back in time. Macunaíma (ma-kew-nah-EE-mah) is selfish and abusive. As a child, he shows a supernatural capacity to metamorphose himself to fulfill his desires. After killing his mother unintentionally, Macunaíma, his two brothers, and Iriqui, the wife of one brother, mourn for a month before leaving their homeland. On their way, they encounter Ci, who is raped by Macunaíma and his brothers. As a consequence, he becomes the Emperor of the Dense Jungle. Later, in a fight against a lake monster, he loses the magical amulet, called Muiraquita, that Ci gave to him. The stone accidentally comes into the possession of his enemy, Venceslau, and so the hero journeys to São Paulo to recover it. After several failed attempts, he kills his enemy and recovers the magical stone. Back in the forest, Macunaíma falls victim to the rancor of Vei: The hero dives into the lake to find a siren that Vei has promised to him and instead is crippled by piranhas. Once again, he loses the Muiraquita. Ultimately, Macunaíma is transformed into the constellation Ursa Major. The novel was considered barbarous, disconnected, fragmented, and excessive upon its publication in 1928. In 1955, however, a detailed explanation of Mário de Andrade’s sources, cultural references, and allusions was published, showing the thematic unity of the work and its complicated background. Macunaíma is now regarded as one of the most representative and influential works of Brazilian Modernism. In 1969, Macunaíma was made into a film.

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poems were published in 1955. The complete works, exclusive of letters and journalism but covering fiction, poetry, literary criticism, art history, musical history, folklore, and even medicine, were published in twenty volumes. Given his vast production in different disciplines, Andrade must be regarded as one of the major forces in Brazilian intellectual history. In literature he is remembered for his fundamental contributions to technical and thematic renovation of fiction and poetry as well as for an exemplary attitude toward national language and cultural manifestations. — Charles A. Perrone Learn More Armstrong, Piers. Third World Literary Fortunes: Brazilian Culture and Its International Reception. Lewisberg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1999. Examines the domestic and international receptions of Andrade, Jorge Amado, and other Brazilian writers. Behague, Gerard. Music in Latin America: An Introduction. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979. An appreciation of Mário de Andrade the musicologist. Foster, David W., and Virginia R. Foster, eds. Modern Latin American Literature. New York: Ungar, 1975. Includes translated highlights of the body of Portuguese-language criticism of Andrade’s work, which is voluminous. Johnson, Randal. Cinema Novo × 5: Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Film. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Provides a discussion of Macunaíma and the 1969 film based on it. Nist, John. The Modernist Movement in Brazil. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967. Includes a chapter on Andrade. Sá, Lúcia. Rain Forest Literatures. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Sá analyzes four indigenous Amazonian cultures and their impact on mainstream Latin American literature. Includes a discussion of Macunaíma. Suárez, José I., and Jack E. Tomlins. Mário de Andrade: The Creative Works. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2000. A critical assessment of Andrade’s novels, poetry, and short stories, discussed within the development of Brazilian Modernism. 67

Reinaldo Arenas Cuban American novelist Born: Holguín, Oriente, Cuba; July 16, 1943 Died: New York, New York; December 7, 1990 long fiction: Celestino antes del alba, 1967 (revised as Cantando en el pozo, 1982; Singing from the Well, 1987; part 1 of The Pentagonía); El mundo alucinante, 1969 (Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Life and Adventures of Friar Servando Teresa de Mier, 1971; also translated as The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando, 1987); El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas, 1975 (as Le Palais des très blanches mouffettes, 1980; The Palace of the White Skunks, 1990; part 2 of The Pentagonía); La vieja Rosa, 1980; Otra vez el mar, 1982 (Farewell to the Sea, 1986; part 3 of The Pentagonía); Arturo, la estrella más brillante, 1984 (Arturo, the Most Brilliant Star, 1989, in Old Rosa); La loma del ángel, 1987 (Graveyard of the Angels, 1987); El portero, 1989 (The Doorman, 1991); Old Rosa: A Novel in Two Stories, 1989 (a combination of La vieja Rosa and Arturo, la estrella más brillante); Viaje a La Habana, 1990; El color del verano, 1991 (The Color of Summer: Or, The New Garden of Earthly Delights, 2000; part 4 of The Pentagonía); El asalto, 1991 (The Assault, 1994; part 5 of The Pentagonía). short fiction: Con los ojos cerrados, 1972 (revised as Termina el desfile, 1981); Adiós a mamá: De La Habana a Nueva York, 1995; Mona, and Other Tales, 2001. drama: Persecución: Cuatro piezas de teatro experimental, pb. 1986. poetry: El central, 1981 (El Central: A Cuban Sugar Mill, 1984); Voluntad de vivir manifestándose, 1989. nonfiction: Necesidad de libertad, 1985; Antes que anochezca, 1992 (Before Night Falls, 1993).

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einaldo Arenas (ray-NAHL-doh ah-RAY-nahs) was one of the most talented Cuban writers of his generation, the first generation educated totally within the revolution of 1959. He 68

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was turned into a pariah by Castroist homophobia and became one of the most outspoken critics of the revolution after he escaped Cuba during the Mariel boatlift in 1980. He killed himself in 1990 after suffering from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) for years. Arenas grew up in an impoverished rural environment in eastern Cuba. As a teenager, he joined the revolution and subsequently received a scholarship to study accounting in Havana, but he soon abandoned this career for his literary ambitions. He worked in the National Library (in the Cuban Book Institute) and became an editor of the important literary magazine La gaceta de Cuba. Arenas was removed from this job in the early 1970’s during the crackdown on Cuban intelligentsia (the “black decade”), was imprisoned for “social deviancy,” and spent time in a “rehabilitation” camp for gay people. After being released in 1976, he lived as an “unperson” in unspeakably inhumane conditions. In 1963, Arenas won a contest in children’s literature; later, his novels Singing from the Well and Hallucinations and his shortstory collection Con los ojos cerrados received first-mention awards in annual competitions in 1965, 1966, and 1968, respectively. However, only Singing from the Well was published in Cuba, after some delay, in 1967. The publication of Hallucinations in

Water cures everything, says the Ogress. . . . When water comes in contact with that sick and misshapen body (whose real name is Ramón Sernada), it begins to bubble, smoke, and even give off little flames. . . . Thanks to that strange immunity (the immunity of AIDS) that prevents even Bloodthirsty Shark from eating her, the Ogress can swim out into the open sea and float along the line of the horizon. —from The Color of Summer (trans. Andrew Hurley) 69

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Cuba was banned because of some homoerotic scenes in the style of José Lezama Lima and because some parodic criticism of the Cuban revolution in the novel was quite obvious. The manuscripts of this novel and of the short stories had to be smuggled out; the French translation of Hallucinations, in 1968, and the Mexican edition, in 1969, gave the first international recognition to the writer who became ostracized at home. The stories in Con los ojos cerrados were published in Uruguay in 1972. Unwittingly, the repression at home helped to spread his work. Publishing abroad without permission was one of the criminal charges eventually brought against him. The Palace of the White Skunks was also published in French, in 1975, long before the

Lázaro Gómez Carriles

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Spanish original appeared in Venezuela (in 1980), and the international success of the novel probably shortened his prison term. Various versions of his explosive novel Farewell to the Sea, which expresses directly and bluntly the disillusionment with the first decade of the revolution, ended up in the hands of the Cuban secret police, and Arenas had to reconstruct the novel after his arrival to the United States. In the United States, Arenas held important fellowships (Guggenheim and Wilson Center Fellowships) and visiting appointments at numerous universities and centers. The 1980’s were a time of feverish creative, editorial, and critical activity. He published the few manuscripts he was able to bring with him on the boat and revised a number of his older texts and reedited them under new titles (to establish the copyright he was deprived of by being a Cuban citizen). He combined former stories into novels (Old Rosa), wrote critical essays and experimental political theater, and expanded his practice of postmodern cannibalization of venerable classics. The Cuban national epic, Cirilo Villaverde’s nineteenth century work Cecilia Valdés, was turned into Graveyard of the Angels; George Orwell’s satire Animal Farm (1945) became a nightmarish reckoning with totalitarianism and with the mother-figure in The Assault. Arenas also completed his pentalogy dealing with the human experience in the crushing wheels of the revolution: The Color of Summer and The Assault close his semiautobiographic cycle of Singing from the Well, The Palace of the White Skunks, and Farewell to the Sea. His exile experience in New York inspired his satirical and fantasticecological novel The Doorman. Arenas worked to the last moment to complete his memoir, Before Night Falls, before his death. His manuscripts are held at Princeton University. The early novels Singing from the Well and Hallucinations are generally considered Arenas’s greatest literary achievements. Singing from the Well re-creates his early childhood in the prerevolutionary Cuban province. Magical Realism and experimentation with language combine in this early postmodern text. The child’s voice and flights of imagination erasing any boundary between reality and fantasy produce a complex narrative game, at the same time immediate and sophisticated. The 71

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Arturo, the Most Brilliant Star Reinaldo Arenas’s commitment to resist and denounce Cuba’s indoctrination practices is evident in his short novel Arturo, the Most Brilliant Star (1984). This work is also significant in that Arenas links his political views on the Cuban Revolution with his increasing interest in gay characters. The plot was inspired by a series of police raids against homosexuals in Havana in the early 1960’s, in which the police picked up thousands of men and denounced them as homosexuals. Those arrested had to undergo ideological training in labor camps. Arturo is one of the thousands of gay men forced into a work camp. He becomes an eyewitness to the rampant use of violence as punishment, descriptions of which coincide with the accounts by gay men who have made similar declarations after their exile from Cuba. A dreary existence prompts some men to do female impersonations, which can make them targets of police brutality. Arturo, a social outcast, suffers rejection by his fellow prisoners for not taking part in the impersonations. Partly as the result of verbal and physical abuse, he joins the group and becomes the camp’s best impersonator. His transformation, especially his use of the female impersonator’s jargon, reminds the reader of the revolutionary jargon forced upon the prisoners, which at first they resist and later mimic to ironic perfection. In order to have some relief from life at the camp, Arturo strives to create a fantastic world in which he is king. The mental process is draining, and he has to work under conditions that threaten his concentration, but his world grows and extends outside the camp. The final touch is the construction of an imaginary castle where a handsome man waits for him. In pursuit of his admirer, Arturo does not recognize that his imaginary walls are the off-limits fences of the camp. When he is ordered to stop, he continues, and is shot dead. — Rafael Ocasio

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story forks, contradicts itself, turns in circles, restarts, and ends several times. The text plays with language and typographic forms. Play, parody, and poetry sublimate the world of poverty, hunger, violence, and repression. A number of Arenas’s other works, including his short stories and memoir, all try to recapture this unique source of his artistic inspiration. Hallucinations applies these principles to modern history, turning Mexican independence into a free allegory of modern revolution. Satire and a sense of the absurd are prominent. — Emil Volek Learn More Arenas, Reinaldo. “Reinaldo Arenas’s Last Interview.” Interview by Perla Rozencvaig. Review: Latin American Literature and Arts 44 (January/June, 1991): 78-83. In this interview, granted shortly before his death in 1990, Arenas talks at length about the novels of the pentalogy. Foster, David W. Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Discusses lucidly the predicament of homoeroticism in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Ocasio, Rafael. Cuba’s Political and Sexual Outlaw: Reinaldo Arenas. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. Examines how Arenas’s opposition to Castro’s government and open homosexuality made it difficult, if not impossible, for him to attain political, sexual, and literary freedom in Cuba. Paulson, Michael G. The Youth and the Beach: A Comparative Study of Thomas Mann’s “Der Tod in Venedig” (“Death in Venice”) and Reinaldo Arenas’s “Otra vez el mar” (“Farewell to the Sea”). Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1993. A critical study. Soto, Francisco. Reinaldo Arenas. New York: Twayne, 1998. A standard biography from Twayne’s World Authors series. _______. Reinaldo Arenas: The Pentagonia. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. A volume that covers both the life and work. Vilaseca, David. Hindsight and the Real: Subjectivity in Gay Hispanic Autobiography. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Vilaseca analyzes the representation of self and identity in the work of Arenas and other gay Latin American, Spanish, and Catalan writers. 73

Roberto Arlt Argentine novelist Born: Buenos Aires, Argentina; April 2, 1900 Died: Buenos Aires, Argentina; July 26, 1942 long fiction: El juguete rabioso, 1926, (Mad Toy, 2002); Los siete locos, 1929 (The Seven Madmen, 1984); Los lanzallamas, 1931; El amor brujo, 1932. short fiction: El jorobadito, 1933; El criador de gorilas, 1941. drama: Trescientos millones, pr. 1932; El fabricante de fantasmas, pr. 1936; Saverio el cruel, pr. 1936. nonfiction: Aguafuertes porteñas, 1933; Nuevas aguafuertes porteñas, 1953; Entre crotos y sabihondos, 1969. miscellaneous: Obras, 1997 (2 volumes).

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oberto Arlt (roh-BEHR-toh arlt) was the antithesis of the genteel dilettantes who dominated Argentine literature in his day. He was forced to abandon his formal education when he was in the third grade, after which he became by turns a dock worker, salesman, laborer, factory worker, and newspaperman. The poverty of tenement life in Buenos Aires was what Arlt knew best. His background made him resolutely unsympathetic to that subject matter favored by upper-class writers—the pleasures of the rich, the glories of the past, and the myths of the vanishing pastoral life—though he knew something of this kind of literature from having served as a secretary in 1925-1927 to one of those writers, the justly acclaimed Ricardo Güiraldes. Despite having had to leave school, Arlt lost neither the desire to learn nor his passionate interest in science, which his German immigrant parents had encouraged in him. He continued his education through reading, and years later he secured a patent for rubberized hosiery. Arlt fictionalizes the thwarting of his scientific obsessions in several novels. The recasting of youthful interests is also evident in his transformation of the 74

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techniques and stock subjects of his favorite childhood authors. In his novels and plays he relies heavily on peril, criminality, and fantasy to create mock-heroic adventures that provide a stark contrast to the pinched lives of the poor. Models for his characters came from many sources. In addition to reflecting his painful childhood experiences, his writing shows the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings on Christianity and authority and of such literary classics as the works of Fyodor Dostoevski and Maxim Gorky. Beyond that, Arlt also drew on his wide acquaintance among the theosophists, petty thieves, pimps, and anarchists of the Buenos Aires underworld whom he met in La Puñalada, a popular working-class café. Arlt celebrates many of these figures, mostly immigrants and variously assimilated have-nots, in his immensely popular journalistic sketches that were published in El Mundo. For his readers these characters held a fascination similar to the one they felt for that other product of Buenos Aires low life, the tango. Silvio Astier, the protagonist of Arlt’s first novel, Mad Toy, leads a familiar picaresque existence. Expelled from his home at an early age, he must fend for himself in a world that does not

Gripped by emotion, I lit the fuse; a small shadowy flame leap-frogged in the sun, and suddenly a terrible explosion enveloped us in a nauseating cloud of white smoke. For a brief moment we were overcome with wonder: it seemed to us in that instant that we had discovered a new continent, or had been turned into owners of the earth by some strange magic. All at once someone yelled, “Beat it! The cops!” —from Mad Toy (trans. Michele McKay Aynesworth)

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The Seven Madmen The Seven Madmen (1929) chronicles the disaffiliation of Remo Erdosain from normal, middle-class life and his increasing involvement with the mysterious conspiracy of The Astrologer. During a period of only a few months, Erdosain moves from being an accounting clerk with a pretty, respectable wife to being the colleague of various denizens of the underworld, occultists, and political fanatics. The novel closes with Erdosain among these dangerous companions, under the charismatic sway of The Astrologer. A footnote promises that the outcome of these unpromising circumstances will appear in a sequel, Los lanzallamas (the flamethrowers), which in fact was published in 1931. It is unclear whether The Astrologer is a socialist revolutionary, a fascist, or the leader of a religious revival. His followers, with the exception of the earnest protagonist, often seem not to believe in the worth of The Astrologer’s project. They hint that no serious revolution is being planned and that the conspirators are merely distracting themselves from boredom with the shared fiction of a grand undertaking. It is this mix of realistic descriptions and plot elements with bizarrely imaginative ones that has won for The Seven Madmen its fame as an important early example of Magical Realism. Even though The Seven Madmen often leaves the reader unsure as to the reality of the events of the plot, it is a realistic work in two important ways. First, it accurately describes the Buenos Aires of the late 1920’s, with special attention to the precarious situation of the lower-middle class in the overheated, poorly balanced economy of the times. Second, it shows, through fiction, some of the forces behind the 1930 military takeover. Indeed, the resemblance to real-world events is so strong that Arlt needed to add a note to post-1930 editions pointing out that he had been unaware of the gathering conspiracy. — Naomi Lindstrom

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seem to have a place for him. Given a scholarship to a military school for his scientific ability, he is dismissed because the army has no need for intelligence. A job in a second-hand bookstore leads to humiliation and the realization that by continuing he would end up like the derelicts who hang about the shop. In a calculated act of purification he makes a failed attempt to burn the store down. The only path to manhood left open is delinquency. Here at least he can play the hero of his reading. In the end Silvio betrays a friend as the fee for initiation into a society that only accepts traitors. His acceptance gives Silvio the luxury of a new start in the wild south. During Arlt’s lifetime his reputation rested almost entirely on his work as a journalist. Like Mad Toy, the novel The Seven Madmen and its sequel, Los lanzallamas (the flamethrowers), met with little critical or commercial success. However, thanks to the efforts of his daughter, Mirta, who kept his works in print, critics and readers discovered Arlt in the second half of the twentieth century. The Seven Madmen and Los lanzallamas came to be regarded as fully realized masterpieces and as anticipations of the many technical innovations that followed in Latin American fiction. Remo Erdosain, the protagonist of both novels, and his lunatic companions inhabit a world resembling the one portrayed by Arlt’s contemporaries—the German expressionist artist George Grosz and the Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello. In a society gone askew only gratuitous, demented acts have the power to point to the truth. These characters no longer have respect for the ideals of family, honorable work, and community, which they consider illusions designed to conceal the legalized criminality of the rich and powerful. To defeat this unacknowledged conspiracy, the Astrologer, Erdosain’s mentor, creates a secret organization of certified and borderline psychotics that plans to use the profits from houses of prostitution to finance a revolution. While they dream of apocalypse, these madmen commit unpardonable acts of violence. Erdosain becomes engaged to a child and then, in an unprovoked and apparently unpremeditated act, kills her. The dying question of the victim is: “What have I done to you?” The answer, Arlt implies, is that in a world 77

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of shattered illusions and worthless ideals, where not even love is genuine, no act, not even the most despicable, requires an answer, much less a justification. — Charles A. Piano Learn More Flint, Jack M. The Prose Works of Roberto Arlt: A Thematic Approach. Durham, England: University of Durham, 1985. Shows the differences in the portrayal of character and detail between the essays and the fiction. Lindstrom, Naomi. “Arlt’s Exposition of the Myth of Woman.” In Woman as Myth and Metaphor in Latin American Literature, edited by Carmelo Virgillo and Naomi Lindstrom. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985. Studies the way in which a female character in The Seven Madmen and Los lanzallamas inspires men to create extravagant myths. Martinez, Elizabeth Coonrod. Before the Boom: Latin American Revolutionary Novels of the 1920’s. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2001. An analysis of Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen) and three other avant-garde novels of the 1920’s, describing how these novels altered and influenced subsequent Latin American fiction. Martinez, Victoria. The Semiotics of a Bourgeois Society: An Analysis of the “Aguafuertes porteñas” by Roberto Arlt. San Francisco: International Scholars, 1998. An examination of the use of language in Arlt’s essays. Describes how that language provides insight into his opinions of the social structure and the place of women in society. Russi, David. “Metatheatre: Roberto Arlt’s Vehicle Toward the Public’s Awareness of an Art Form.” Latin American Theatre Review 24 (Fall, 1990). A study of the self-consciously theatrical element in three plays.

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Juan José Arreola Mexican short-story writer Born: Zapotlán (now Ciudad Guzmán), Jalisco, Mexico; September 21, 1918 Died: Guadalajara, Mexico; December 3, 2001 short fiction: Varia invención, 1949 (Various Inventions, 1964); Confabulario, 1952 (Confabulary, 1964); Punto de Plata, 1958 (Silverpoint, 1964); Bestiario, 1958 (Bestiary, 1964); Confabulario total, 1941-1961, 1962 (Confabulary, and Other Inventions, 1964); Palindroma, 1971; Confabulario personal, 1980; Narrativa completa, 1997. long fiction: La feria, 1963 (The Fair, 1977). drama: La hora de todos, pb. 1954; Tercera llamada ¡Tercera! O empezamos sin usted, pb. 1971. nonfiction: La palabra educación, 1973 (Jorge Arturo Ojeda, editor); Y ahora la mujer . . . , 1975 (Arturo Ojeda, editor); Inventario, 1976; Prosa dispersa, 2002 (Orso Arreola, editor). edited text: Lectura en voz alta, 1968 (anthology). miscellaneous: Estas páginas mías, 1985; Obras, 1995.

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uan José Arreola (hwahn hoh-ZAY ahr-ee-OHL-ah) ranks as one of the major short-story writers of the twentieth century in Latin America, yet he is rarely studied outside his homeland. Born in Zapotlán, a large town near Guadalajara, Jalisco, he had formal schooling until he was twelve years old, at which point he found his first job as an apprentice with a master bookbinder. Arreola moved to Guadalajara in 1934 and to Mexico City in 1937, working odd jobs, most of which were menial, while attempting to break into the literary scene. He had a brief spell as an actor in the Teatro de Medianoche (midnight theater) while in Mexico City, but this venture ended in failure. Returning to Zapotlán in 1940, he began to teach in a secondary school. His short story “Hizo el bien mientras vivió” (he 79

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The stranger arrived at the deserted station out of breath. His large suitcase, which nobody carried for him, had really tired him out. He mopped his face with a handkerchief, and with his hand shading his eyes, gazed at the tracks that melted away in the distance. Dejected and thoughtful, he consulted his watch: it was the exact time when the train was supposed to leave. —from “The Switchman” (trans. George D. Schade)

did good while he lived), published in Eos in 1943, attracted some attention in Mexico City. Arreola married in 1944, but his marriage was not a happy one. In 1945, he won a government scholarship to study in Paris but because of ill health was forced to return to Mexico the following year. He subsequently worked at the prestigious publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica in Mexico City, writing blurbs for new books. In 1949, he brought out his first significant literary work, Various Inventions, a collection of eighteen short stories, which attracted positive reviews. This was followed in 1952 by Confabulary, which contains animal tales, existentialist horror and Magical Realist stories, and satiric essays. Arreola reused these two titles later on; rather than invent new titles, he would usually reprint earlier stories and add new work written in the intervening years. Arreola’s literary work thus should be seen as a series of concentric ripples emanating from these two early works rather than as a linear trajectory of separately conceived works. In 1954, Arreola, always drawn to the theater, published a serious farce, La hora de todos (moment of truth), but it was a flop and convinced him that his talents lay elsewhere. In the early 1950’s, he embarked on two new projects: He founded a book series, Los Presentes, which aimed to publish new Mexican writers, and he collaborated with the Centro Mexicano de Escri80

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tores (Mexican writers’ center). In this collaboration, he and Juan Rulfo, one of Mexico’s most famous short-story writers, agreed to improve the writing skills of a group of promising writers, who received a scholarship from the center. Among the list of writers who learned their craft under Arreola’s tutelage were many who would one day form the backbone of the next generation of Mexican writers; they included Homero Aridjis, Inés Arredondo, Emilio Carballido, Rosario Castellanos, Alí Chumacero, Fernando del Paso, Salvador Elizondo, Carlos Fuentes, Luisa Josefina Hernández, Jorge Ibargüengoitia, José Agustín, Vicente Leñero, Carlos Monsiváis, and Gustavo Sainz. Intriguingly, Arreola’s literary output, compared with that of some of the writers he coached, was small. Moreover, some of his short stories are small even by the standards of the genre (barely a page long). In a number of interviews, Arreola admitted to finding it difficult to write; he often needed an external agency (such as a deadline) or an internal event (such as a personal crisis regarding which he needed to achieve catharsis through writing) to force him to put pen to paper. Although Arreola’s literary output was slim, it is of high quality. During the 1950’s, for example, he wrote some of his classic short stories, such as “The Switchman,” “A Tamed Woman,” “I’m Telling You the Truth,” and “The Prodigious Milligram.” With these stories, Arreola created a new literary vogue: He encouraged Mexican writers to break out of the straitjacket of realism and inspired them to tap the potential of the magical in their literary works. Arreola was, indeed, one of the forerunners of Magical Realism, which describes the fantastic as if it were ordinary. His most anthologized story, “The Switchman,” is an excellent example of this new style. It begins with an unnamed “foreigner” who arrives at a railway station waiting for a train to take him to a place called T. He engages in a conversation with a little old man (who is later revealed to be the switchman of the title), who advises him to forget about catching a train, but instead to “look for lodging in the inn.” The traveler is then treated to a long description of how trains are very irregular, how they often do not go where they are meant to, and how the derailment of one 81

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“The Prodigious Milligram” “El prodigioso miligramo” (“The Prodigious Milligram”) is a modern allegorical fable involving an ant colony, and is one of the author’s best-known and cleverest pieces. Arreola’s main concern is human social behavior and the nature of human values. A nonconformist ant known for wandering out of line at work discovers “a prodigious milligram” (it is never defined otherwise) and joyfully carries it back to the colony. There she is greeted with derision and disapproval for disrupting the routine and introducing something unusual of her own free will, an act that would have led to her execution but for the intervention of a psychiatrist who promptly declares her mentally incompetent and suggests that she be locked up in a cell. The ant dies in her cell while admiring the splendid, glowing milligram. Legends begin to spread about her, and hundreds, then thousands, of ants give up their assigned tasks to go out and find prodigious milligrams, as she did, carrying them back to a central room in the colony. Conflicts arise between different groups of ants over the quality of the milligrams and their safeguarding. Wealthy ants form private collections. Thievery becomes rampant. War erupts and many ants are killed. Famine follows, for no one has been storing food for the winter. At the end of the story, the entire species is on the verge of extinction. As in any good fable, ambiguity abounds. Arreola plays with the notion of how arbitrary value can be, starting from an absurd premise and carrying it logically to its extreme conclusion in a convincing fashion. Readers can think about this story in terms of politics, religion, and economics, exploring with the author the tragic consequences to society when people behave in ways that stifle originality, creativity, independence, and human dignity. In many ways, the story is open-ended, for it easily lends itself to myriad interpretations. — Harry L. Rosser

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train led to the foundation of a village. Finally, a whistle is heard in the distance, and the train arrives. In this story, Arreola builds on an everyday situation (waiting for a train in a train station) that can function simultaneously as an allegory of the Mexican nation (bureaucracy gone wild) and an existentialist tale of metaphysical aimlessness (the train, like life, goes nowhere). In 1955, Arreola published his two earlier collections Various Inventions and Confabulary in an expanded edition that included some new works written in the intervening years. From the late 1950’s onward, a new emphasis emerged in Arreola’s work; fiction became less prominent and essays more so. In 1958, he published Silverpoint, written to accompany illustrations designed for the zoo in Chapultepec Park in Mexico City. In 1968, he brought out an anthology of his favorite selections from world-renowned authors, Lectura en voz alta (reading aloud), and in 1971 he published Palindroma (palindrome), a new collection of short works, combining short stories with satiric pieces and including a one-act play. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Arreola turned his attention to journalism and the television industry. He died in 2001 at the age of eighty-three. — Stephen M. Hart Learn More Burt, John R. “This Is No Way to Run a Railroad: Arreola’s Allegorical Railroad and a Possible Source.” Hispania 71, no. 4 (1988). Compares “The Switchman” to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad” (1843). Gilgen, Read G. “Absurdist Techniques in the Short Stories of Juan José Arreola.” Journal of Spanish Studies: Twentieth Century 8, nos. 1/2 (1980): 67-77. This concise treatment of the notion of the absurd focuses on techniques that help explain Arreola’s artistic philosophy. The notes provide references to a few other studies on the absurd as well as on Arreola’s work. Heusinkveld, Paula R. “Juan José Arreola: Allegorist in an Age of Uncertainty.” Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 13, nos. 2/3 (1984). Argues that Arreola’s short stories need to be seen as allegories of the modern world. Shows that Arreola chooses symbols such as animals or nameless anti83

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heroes that represent human limitations rather than human potential. Larson, Ross. Fantasy and Imagination in the Mexican Narrative. Tempe: Arizona State University Center for Latin American Studies, 1977. Arreola is viewed as a major contributor to the movement away from literature with an explicit social purpose. Several of his stories are dealt with, although in somewhat cursory fashion. Contains an extensive bibliography and a useful index. McMurray, George R. “Albert Camus’ Concept of the Absurd and Juan José Arreola’s ‘The Switchman.’” Latin American Literary Review 11 (1977). Discusses the allegorical meaning of waiting in that short story. Menton, Seymour. “Juan José Arreola and the Twentieth Century Short Story.” Hispania 42, no. 3 (September, 1959): 295308. This study of Arreola by his close friend remains the classic introduction to the man and his early work. Arreola is credited with developing the fantastic as a viable way to represent the conflicts and concerns of people trapped under the pressures of modern society. Attention is given to his place within the surrealist movement, his major themes, techniques, and worldview. Schade, George. Introduction to Confabulario, and Other Inventions, by Juan José Arreola. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964. This excellent English translation largely follows the text and arrangement of the 1962 edition of Confabulario total. Excluded is the one-act play La hora de todos, which Schade deems ineffectual and out of place in this collection. Provides a brief but incisive introduction to the stories. Washburn, Yulan. Juan José Arreola. Boston: Twayne, 1983. A thorough study of Arreola and his work that draws on critical studies in both Spanish and English, as well as on personal interviews with the writer. Detailed plot summaries are followed by scrupulous textual analyses. Includes an extensive discussion of Arreola’s life and times and a substantial select bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

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Miguel Ángel Asturias Guatemalan novelist Born: Guatemala City, Guatemala; October 19, 1899 Died: Madrid, Spain; June 9, 1974 long fiction: El Señor Presidente, 1946 (The President, 1963); Hombres de maíz, 1949 (Men of Maize, 1975); Viento fuerte, 1950 (The Cyclone, 1967; better known as Strong Wind, 1968); El papa verde, 1954 (The Green Pope, 1971); Los ojos de los enterrados, 1960 (The Eyes of the Interred, 1973); El alhajadito, 1961 (The Bejeweled Boy, 1971); Mulata de tal, 1963 (Mulata, 1967); Maladrón, 1969. short fiction: Leyendas de Guatemala, 1930; Week-end en Guatemala, 1956; El espejo de Lida Sal, 1967 (The Mirror of Lida Sal, 1997); Novelas y cuentos de juventud, 1971; Viernes de dolores, 1972. drama: Cuculcán, pb. 1930, pr. 1955; Soluna, pb. 1955; La audiencia de los confines, pr., pb. 1957; Chantaje, pr., pb. 1964; Dique seco, pr., pb. 1964; Teatro, pb. 1964. poetry: Sien de alondra, 1949; Bolívar, 1955; Clarivigilia primaveral, 1965. nonfiction: Sociología guatemalteca: El problema social del indio, 1923 (Guatemalan Sociology, 1977); La arquitectura de la vida nueva, 1928; Rumania: Su nueva imagen, 1964 (essays); Latinoamérica y otros ensayos, 1968 (essays); Tres de cuatro soles, 1977. miscellaneous: Obras completas, 1967 (3 volumes).

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iguel Ángel Asturias (mee-GEHL AHN-zhehl ahs-TEWRyahs) is considered one of the three most important Latin American writers of his generation (Jorge Luis Borges and Alejo Carpentier are the other two) and one of the two major influences in the twentieth century on the development of the Latin American novel. He was born in Guatemala City, Guatemala, to Ernesto Asturias, a magistrate, and María Rosales, a 85

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schoolteacher, on October 19, 1899, a year after the accession to the presidency of the infamous dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera. Unable to tolerate the politically vindictive and repressive measures of the Estrada Cabrera regime, Ernesto Asturias moved his family to a small village near the outskirts of Guatemala City. There, and later in Salamá, an even smaller village in the Guatemalan interior, young Miguel’s contact with the magical vision of the indigenous Indian cultures initiated his personal education and stimulated his artistic development. Travels into the hinterland with his maternal grandfather to oversee the family estates were also a regular part of his early years and subsequently provided the intimate knowledge and experience of Indian languages, lifestyles, and traditions which would lead Asturias in later years to first the writing of a thesis (Sociología guatemalteca: El problema social del indio) on the social problems of the Indians in Guatemala and later, in the mid1920’s, to the formal study (and translation into Spanish) of pre-Columbian literary and mythological texts. The years from 1899 to 1920, when he lived under the sternly repressive government of Estrada Cabrera, were decisive in shaping the political and artistic temperament of the writer. As

She couldn’t face anything (conversing with eyes, with hands), that Cardenala Cifuentes. There were no words. Not her words, anyway. She didn’t want to answer for anything. Hers were sounds articulated to her distress, to the iciness of her backbone, to the gooseflesh which, moment by moment, converted her into a watering can riddled with fat pores. They ate her body, her head, the palms of her hands. Why, why didn’t Cardenala say something? —from The Mirror of Lida Sal (trans. Gilbert Alter-Gilbert)

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© The Nobel Foundation

a student activist, Asturias spearheaded the founding of a popular university in 1922 following the overthrow of the Estrada Cabrera dictatorship (an event to which his activities had significantly contributed). As a community project, the popular university was intended to increase the social and political influence of the underprivileged sectors of Guatemalan society through the contributions and active involvement of the middle class in educational and other programs for the poor. Although granted his law degree in 1923, because he was an editor of a weekly journal called Tiempos nuevos (new times), 87


Asturias was forced into exile when the paper fell into disfavor with the succeeding regime. It was during this first of several exiles in London, and later Paris, that Asturias returned to his diary in a notebook—begun in December of 1917, in response to the great earthquake that leveled Guatemala City—to produce the stories that were subsequently transformed into his first expression of devotion to his country and his first published work, Leyendas de Guatemala (legends of Guatemala). Breaking with the realist and naturalist traditions of “Indianist” writings of previous generations, Asturias expanded the possibilities of the genre by infusing a conventional narrative style with the mythopoeic language and the oneiric texture and modes of perception found in the sixteenth century works Popol Vuh and Annals of the Cakchiquels. Under the notable influence of these surviving sacred texts of the Maya Quiché and Maya Cakchiquels, his authoritative knowledge derived from five years of literary and anthropological studies at the Musée de l’Homme and the Sorbonne in Paris, and inspired by the theories and techniques of French Surrealism for exploring the unconscious in literature and art, Asturias brought an unprecedented degree of innovation and authenticity to Latin American imaginative writings about Indians. Although the critical reception accorded his first book was favorable and encouraging, nearly sixteen years separate the stories of Leyendas de Guatemala from Asturias’s first novel, The President. It began as a short story (“Los mendigos políticos,” the political beggars) written originally for a literary contest in Guatemala in 1923 but never submitted. Stimulated by personal memories evoked by meetings of exiled writers to discuss and compare anecdotes on Latin American dictatorships they had known, the story evolved over the next two decades from oral speech and tale into what is generally considered to be the author’s most important novel. First published in Mexico in 1946, The President epitomizes the most characteristic and persistent elements found in Asturias’s fiction: the fusion of myth, dream, and magic to establish a specific cultural frame of reference; political portraiture and social criticism; linguistic inventiveness; complexity of narrative structure; and technical experimenta88


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“Leyenda del sombrerón” “Leyenda del sombrerón” (“Legend of the Big Hat”) tells the story of the origin of the Devil’s big hat. The legend as Asturias tells it concerns a monastery inhabited by devout monks, specifically by one monk who spends his time in appropriately devotional readings and meditation. One day, the monk’s exemplary otherworldliness is broken by a ball that comes flying through the window, the lost toy of an Indian boy playing outside the walls of the monastery. At first, the monk is entranced by this unknown object, which he takes in his hands, imagining that so must have been the earth in the hands of the Creator. The monk begins to play with the ball with almost childish joy. A few days later, however, the child’s mother comes to the door of the monastery to ask that her son be given religious instruction; it seems that he has been heartbroken since the loss of his ball in the area of the monastery, a ball claimed popularly to be the very image of the Devil. Suddenly possessed by a violent rage, the monk runs to his cell, picks up the ball, and hurls it beyond the walls of the monastery. Flying through the air, the ball assumes the form of the black hat of the devil. The story ends with: “And thus is born to the world the big hat.” The story concerns conflicting antagonistic forces. The monk sees the ball first as a symbol of God’s creation, and it is only with the appearance of the peasant woman and her casual reference to the ball as the image of the Devil that he suddenly becomes enraged with its presence. — David W. Foster

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tion designed to expand the experience of the novel beyond the narrow confines of naturalism and literary regionalism. The themes of humankind in harmony with nature, people’s resistance to economic exploitation, and the evil and cruelty of political corruption are also central to the novel’s purpose. In 1952 Asturias received the Prix International du Livre Français for the French translation of The President and, in 1972, the William Faulkner Foundation’s Ibero-American Novel Award when the English translation appeared. Although based on incidents of the Estrada Cabrera dictatorship, the novel’s events exist in that kind of fantastically timeless dimension and locale intended to evoke the “hallucinatory” perception and experience of the world that Asturias associates with the indigenous, pre-Columbian imagination: realismo mágico. This “Magical Realism” became the dominant tendency in Latin American prose fiction of the twentieth century, and Asturias is considered one of its inventors and (along with Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier) most successful practitioners. The critical success of The President was followed three years later by Men of Maize, the novel Asturias identified as his favorite. Based on Indian legends of humankind’s creation by the gods from corn, the novel is much more obscure, much more Indianist, and much less nightmarish in atmosphere than The President. Asturias returned to Guatemala in 1933 and established a radio news program, “El diario del aire” (daily news on the air). It was the only news commentary program under the right-wing regime of then-president Ubico Castañeda. Following the 1944 revolution, Asturias was appointed to diplomatic posts in Mexico, Argentina, France, and El Salvador. The years from 1954 to 1959 saw him again in exile. Artistically, these were very productive years. He completed his Banana Trilogy, begun in 1950 with Strong Wind and followed by The Green Pope and The Eyes of the Interred. This trilogy was followed by The Bejeweled Boy, Mulata, and Maladrón, along with several collections of short stories, several volumes of poetry, and numerous journalistic writings. In 1966 Asturias was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. In 1967 he became the first Latin American novelist to be awarded the 90


Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1970 he was made a member of the French Légion d’Honneur. These prestigious awards gave international recognition of his importance. They also contributed greatly to diminishing negative criticism of the author’s works because of the pervasive Marxist, anti-American themes explicit in his narratives. Today there is neither question of Asturias’s literary achievements nor debate over the significance of his contribution to world literature. — Roland E. Bush Learn More Brotherston, Gordon. The Emergence of the Latin American Novel. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1977. This scholarly work is intended as an introduction to the Latin American novel, particularly from the 1950’s to the 1970’s. The chapter on Asturias discusses the author’s work in the light of his politics, culture, and literary influences. Contains a general bibliography of secondary works on Latin American literature as well as a list of works by and about the major authors mentioned in the text. Accessible to the general reader. Callan, Richard. Miguel Ángel Asturias. New York: Twayne, 1970. An introductory study with a chapter of biography and a separate chapter discussing each of Asturias’s major novels. Includes a chronology, notes, and an annotated bibliography. Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto. Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990. A very helpful volume in coming to terms with Asturias’s unusual narratives. Harss, Luis, and Barbara Dohmann. “Miguel Ángel Asturias: Or, The Land Where the Flowers Bloom.” In Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. Based on interviews, the section devoted to Asturias offers useful information on the author’s thought. The commentary on the novels and plays, however, reveals an extremely cursory reading of his works. Henighan, Stephen. Assuming the Light: The Parisian Literary Apprenticeship of Miguel Ángel Asturias. Oxford, England: Le91


genda, 1999. Henighan assesses the influence of Asturias’s life in Paris in the 1920’s and 1930’s on his literary career. He argues that living in Paris taught Asturias to define his Guatemalan identity from a French vantage point and made him aware of literary innovations he would incorporate into his writing. Marting, Diane E. The Sexual Woman in Latin American Literature: Dangerous Desires. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. Analyzes novels by Asturias, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa to examine their treatment of women. Marting argues that despite the “sexual revolution” of the 1960’s, Latin American novelists continued to portray women with sexual desires as dangerous. Peden, Margaret Sayers, ed. The Latin American Short Story. Boston: Twayne, 1983. The essays in this insightful collection chart the main currents and principal figures of the historical mainstream of the Latin American short story, suggesting the outlines of the great depth and breadth of the genre in these lands. The section devoted to Asturias focuses on Leyendas de Guatemala. Contains a select list of authors, collections in English, and critical studies in English. Prieto, Rene. Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Archaeology of Return. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993. The best available study in English of the novelist’s body of work. Prieto discusses both the stories and the novels, analyzing their unifying principles, idiom, and eroticism. Prieto’s measured introduction, in which he carefully analyzes Asturias’s reputation and identifies his most important work, is especially useful. Includes very detailed notes and bibliography.

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Mariano Azuela Mexican novelist Born: Lagos de Moreno, Mexico; January 1, 1873 Died: Mexico City, Mexico; March 1, 1952 long fiction: María Luisa, 1907; Los fracasados, 1908; Mala yerba, 1909 (Marcela: A Mexican Love Story, 1932); Andrés Pérez, maderista, 1911; Sin amor, 1912; Los de abajo, 1916, revised 1920 (The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution, 1929, 1963); Los caciques, 1917 (The Bosses, 1956); Las moscas, 1918 (The Flies, 1956); Las tribulaciones de una familia decente, 1918 (The Trials of a Respectable Family, 1963); La malhora, 1923; El desquite, 1925; La luciérnaga, 1932 (The Firefly, 1979); Precursores, 1935; El camarada Pantoja, 1937; San Gabriel de Valdivias, comunidad indígena, 1938; Regina Landa, 1939; Avanzada, 1940; Nueva burguesía, 1941; La marchanta, 1944; La mujer domada, 1946; Sendas perdidas, 1949; La maldición, 1955; Esa sangre, 1956; Two Novels of Mexico, 1956; Two Novels of the Mexican Revolution, 1963; Three Novels, 1979. short fiction: María Luisa y otros cuentos, 1937. drama: Los do abajo, pr. 1929; Del Llano Hermanos, S. en C., pr. 1936; El buho en la noche, pb. 1938. nonfiction: Pedro Moreno, el insurgente, 1933 (serial), 1935 (book); El padre Don Agustín Rivera, 1942; Cien años de novela mexicana, 1947; Páginas autobiográficas, 1974. miscellaneous: Mariano Azuela: Obras completas, 1958-1960 (Alí Chumacero, editor); Epistolario y archivo, 1969.

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ariano Azuela (mah-ree-AHN-oh ahs-WAY-lah) is considered the leading Mexican novelist of the first half of the twentieth century. He produced not only the highly acclaimed cycle The Underdogs, but until his death chronicled assiduously the unfolding drama of Mexican history in his times. Azuela was born into a middle-class family; he studied medicine in Gua93

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dalajara and returned to his native city to practice in 1900. Soon his office became a meeting place for members of the local intelligentsia. He married that same year, and he and his wife had ten children together. He seemed assured of the peaceful, comfortable life of a recognized provincial doctor. In 1907 he published María Luisa, which is based on a tragic case he observed during his student years in Guadalajara. Already in his earliest writing, Azuela raised his voice against the social ills he perceived in Mexico, which was undergoing the first stage of modernization under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Azuela reached the peak of his early maturity in the novel Marcela: A Mexican Love Story, a powerful indictment of the feu-

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The rebels were a maddened mob, sunburnt, filthy, naked. Their high wide-brimmed straw hats hid their faces. The “high hats” came back as happily as they had marched forth a few days before, pillaging every hamlet along the road, every ranch, even the poorest hut. —from The Underdogs (trans. E. Munguía, Jr.)

dal landholding system still prevalent in Mexico at that time. In its melodramatic story line, naturalistic precision, social critique, and depiction of the confrontation of human beings and nature, the work is characteristic of the Latin American “novel of the land” of the 1920’s and 1930’s. In Mexico the mystique of the land was suffused with history. When the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) erupted, Azuela, who supported Francisco Madero’s side, was named political head of his native town. Yet he realized very soon how skewed the revolutionary process was and how self-destructive the idealist Madero. At the first opportunity he resigned from active participation in events. In Andrés Pérez, maderista, he documented his critique of the failing revolution. Azuela’s prudence probably saved his life after the old forces returned to power under General Victoriano Huerta. Toward the end of 1914 some allied forces of Pancho Villa reached Lagos de Moreno, at which point Azuela was able, though belatedly, to join the revolution. He was unprepared for the revolutionaries’ split into warring factions, or for chance marking him as one of the villistas, who were the losing faction in the internecine struggle. Azuela underwent a year-long odyssey that led him through half of Mexico, from one defeat to the next, in the strategic and many times chaotic retreat of Villa’s forces to their northern base. There, however, they were confronted with the U.S. support of their adversaries. It was under these circumstances and from the perspective of the crushed in the revolutionary pro95

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The Trials of a Respectable Family The Trials of a Respectable Family (1918) portrays the events that took place in Mexico City in 1916 and 1917 during the administration of President Venustiano Carranza, known in the novel ironically as “el primer Jefe” (the number-one boss). The Vázquez Pradoses, an upper-middle-class family from Zacatecas, take refuge in Mexico City in order to escape the ravages of the Revolution. In the capital, however, the family is overwhelmed by the massive social upheaval created by the war, for it is a world in which cynical opportunists, such as General Covarrubias, use crime as a means of achieving high office. The novel has some compelling scenes, such as the brutality of soldiers’ treatment of the civilian population in downtown Mexico City described by Lulú and César, which ensure the novel’s place in the Azuela canon as a valuable social document. Procopio, the patriarch of the family, is presented sympathetically; he loses his fortune but comes to terms with his fate when he finds a job as an office employee, a situation he would never have accepted in Zacatecas. The two main themes of this work are the betrayal of the Revolution and the virtue of honest work. — Stephen M. Hart

cess that Azuela started to plot his greatest novel, The Underdogs, one of Mexico’s founding fictions. By the time he slipped out of his war-torn country and reached El Paso in the fall of 1915, he had completed the bulk of the first version, and he finished the novel as it was being printed as a weekly supplement of a local paper. There were several subsequent book editions, but the novel remained largely unknown until it was discovered in the mid-1920’s and became a contemporary classic. Azuela substantially reworked the novel for the 1920 edition; he strengthened its structure, achieving a narrative carefully 96

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planned and masterfully executed with attention to the smallest detail, yet he managed to maintain the freshness of the original version. In the story, the effaced narrator lets his characters engage in a truly polyphonic dialogue. The discourse mixes lyricism, rough language, and satire, and it is saturated by references to the popular culture produced by the revolution. Nature symbolism and a story line that proceeds concentrically give the narrative a mythical frame. In the work, personal experience, myth, history, and culture blend into a powerful expression. In the chaos that ensued after the rout of the villistas, Azuela, in disguise, returned to Jalisco to move his family to Mexico City, where he established his practice in the city’s poor districts. He continued to be a keen observer and critic of the Mexico emerging from the revolutionary upheaval, although none of his later novels achieved the recognition of The Underdogs. In 1942 he was awarded the National Prize for Literature and in 1949 the National Prize for Arts and Sciences. — Emil Volek Learn More Griffin, Clive. Azuela: “Los de abajo.” London: Grant and Cutler, 1993. An excellent study of Azuela’s masterpiece, with separate chapters on the historical backdrop to the Revolution, realism, characterization, and structure. Herbst, Gerhard R. Mexican Society as Seen by Mariano Azuela. New York: Ediciones ABRA, 1977. Studies eight of Azuela’s novels and deduces his vision of Mexican society. Shows that although Azuela became embittered once Pancho Villa, whom he supported, was defeated, he nevertheless maintained a faith in the man of the street. Leal, Luis. Mariano Azuela. New York: Twayne, 1971. An excellent overview of Azuela’s work by a writer with great insight into Azuela as a person and as a writer. Martínez, Eliud. The Art of Mariano Azuela: Modernism in “La malhora,” “El desquite,” “La luciérnaga.” Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review, 1980. A competent study of Azuela’s lesser-known novels. Particularly good is the chapter on The Firefly, which analyzes the novel chapter by chapter and shows 97

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how Azuela uses avant-garde techniques in order to enhance his message. Argues that The Firefly is Azuela’s best novel. Robe, Stanley L. Azuela and the Mexican Underdogs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Compares the first version of The Underdogs when serialized in 1915 with its definitive version published in 1920. Also provides a detailed picture of the two years of political unrest, 1914 and 1915, in which this novel is set. Sommers, Joseph. After the Storm: Landmarks of the Modern Mexican Novel. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968. The section on The Underdogs was the first to argue convincingly that Azuela focuses so much in his novel on the carnage and immediacy of the Mexican Revolution that he does not understand (or indeed reveal) its causes.

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Jimmy Santiago Baca Apache and Mexican American poet Born: Santa Fe, New Mexico; January 2, 1952 Also known as: José Santiago Baca poetry: Jimmy Santiago Baca, 1978; Immigrants in Our Own Land, 1979; Swords of Darkness, 1981; What’s Happening, 1982; Poems Taken from My Yard, 1986; Martín; &, Meditations on the South Valley, 1987; Black Mesa Poems, 1989 (includes Poems Taken from My Yard); Immigrants in Our Own Land, and Selected Earlier Poems, 1990; In the Way of the Sun, 1997; Set This Book on Fire, 1999; Que Linda la Brisa, 2000 (with Benjamin Alier Sáenz; photographs by James Drake); Healing Earthquakes: A Love Story in Poems, 2001; C-Train (Dream Boy’s Story) and Thirteen Mexicans, 2002; Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande, 2004. short fiction: The Importance of a Piece of Paper, 2004. screenplay: Bound by Honor, 1993 (with Floyd Mutrux and Ross Thomas). drama: Los tres hijos de Julia, pr. 1991. nonfiction: A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet, 2001. miscellaneous: Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio, 1992 (essays, journal entries, and poetry).

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or his poems, Jimmy Santiago Baca (JIH-mee sahn-tee-AHgoh BAH-kah), born José Santiago Baca, draws not only from his life’s experiences but also from the Southwest, where he was born. He displays a rich appreciation for language, as well as his cultures. His writings also reveal important insights into the human and spiritual conditions of his people. He has been called the people’s poet. Like many other great writers, Baca loves language, and, like other writers steeped in the cultures of the Southwest, he credits language with power, attributing his “rebirth” to language. The power he refers to is both mystical and real. For him, language has both a lit99

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My grandmother’s face has a powerful dignity, like that of an old female eagle on a craggy peak, whose world is eternal. Her gestures are restrained, tentative and soft, as if the world around her, the innocent earth and flowers, were a child easily bruised. Her silence is sunlight sparkling in a freshwater snowmelt stream. —from “Imagine My Life”

eral and figurative power of creation and self-renewal. Much of his work is about transformation, metamorphosis, and selfactualization. Baca’s mother was Chicana and his father an Apache Indian. Coming from this heritage, Baca understands the problems caused by poverty and poor education as well as other social issues that affect many people in New Mexico. His parents divorced when he was two years old. Much of his writing seeks to recover those elements of himself lost between the years following his parents’ divorce and his rebirth through language. His mother’s second husband killed her, and his father died of alcoholism. Baca lived with grandparents for a while, but at the age of five he was placed in St. Anthony’s Home for Boys in Albuquerque. He also spent many years on the streets, learning to survive. Between the ages of eleven and twenty, Baca traveled to southeastern states before returning back to the Southwest. When he was twenty, he was charged with drug possession and sentenced to five years at the prison in Florence, Arizona. The sentence was later extended to six years, and he spent four of those years in isolation. Baca’s experience in what he called “this huge cemetery called the prisons of America” became the means for him to turn away from his past life. He claims that he spent a good amount of time in solitary confinement. Because he felt his imprisonment diminished his sense of self, he looked for produc100

Lawrence Benton. Courtesy of New Directions

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Black Mesa Poems Set in the desert of New Mexico, Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Black Mesa Poems (1989) explores the poet’s continuing search for connections with his family, home, and cultural heritage. In vivid detail and striking imagery, the loosely connected poems catalog the poet’s complex relationships with his past and the home he makes of Black Mesa. Baca’s intricate relationship to the land includes his knowledge of its history. He is keenly aware of the changes the land has undergone and the changes the people of that land have experienced. He writes of his personal sense of connection with arroyos and cottonwoods and of the conflicts between the earlier inhabitants of Black Mesa and the changes brought by progress. Dispossessed migrant workers are portrayed as the price of Anglo progress, and the arid land that once nourished strong cattle now offers only “sluggish pampered globs” from feedlots. Even the once sacred places have been unceremoniously “crusted with housing tracts.” His people have been separated from their ancestral land, yet Baca

tive ways to spend his time. Like many inmates, he was functionally illiterate. He taught himself to read and obtained his GED (General Equivalency [high school] Diploma). Poetry caught his attention first; he read the works of Pablo Neruda, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Federico García Lorca, as well as those of William Wordsworth, Mary Baker, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Denise Levertov, and Allen Ginsberg. While in prison, Baca was encouraged by a fellow inmate to write and send his works to Mother Jones magazine, at which Denise Levertov was poetry editor. Baca claims he needed help to address the envelope containing his submissions. After his first successful submission to Mother Jones, he received encour102

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celebrates his identification with the old adobe buildings and Aztec warriors in the face of modern Anglo society. Despite nostalgia, Baca eludes naïve sentimentality by rooting his sense of self and racial identity in the physical landscape of Black Mesa. He evokes a strong connection with the history of his people through rituals, including drum ceremonies that “mate heart with earth.” The poet presents himself in terms of his own troubled history, but he knows that the conflict between the “peaceful” man and the “destructive” one of his past is linked to the modern smothering of noisy jet fighters and invading pampered artists looking to his land for a “primitive place.” Memories and images of snapshot-like detail combine in these poems to create a portrait of a man defining himself in relation to his personal and cultural history. The poet knows he is “the end result of Conquistadores, Black Moors, American Indians, and Europeans,” and he also notes the continuing invasion of land development. Poems about his children combine memories of his troubled past with Olmec kings and tribal ancestors, and the history of his ancestors’ relationship with the land informs his evolving sense of identity. Throughout these poems, Baca’s personal history becomes rooted in Black Mesa. — William Vaughn

agement from Levertov, and he began to transform himself into a poet. Rather than allow bitterness and hatred to imbue his works, Baca used writing as a process of reconstructing his life. Themes of transformation, change, and self-actualization permeate his work, which is also connected to personal circumstance. Having discovered the power of language for transformation and reconstruction, Baca used his gifts for writing to respond to his circumstances—those of the past and those he endured in prison. Upon his release, Baca went to his sister’s home. There he began the process of discovering his former self and constructing his new identity. He says that upon leaving prison he 103

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could not recognize the person he had been; the changes he saw were marked. He said of a photograph of himself at age sixteen: I knew it was me, but my mind had taken such cosmic leaps through language, and consequently those leaps entailed a sort of immolation, a sort of ritual burning of past . . . and language, the vowels, the consonants, the syllables all became a sort of pyre which the past was placed on, and burned in the flames of language.

In his book Healing Earthquakes, Baca presents a “poetic” biography. The poems recall his past life, his time in prison, discovery of memories of his grandmother and her loving influence on him, finding love, transcending his experiences in prison with drugs and alcohol, and finally his rebirth through language. His poems demonstrate his skillful and passionate use of language and his connection to his community as well as his journey through life. Along the way, he has received awards, including the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for Martín; &, Meditations on the South Valley, the National Heritage Award, a Wallace Stevens poetry fellowship, and a Ludwig Vogelstein award. This American poet combines the freedom expressed by Whitman with his own power, passion, and connection to his Chicano/Apache roots. The messages within his poems ring true to those who know, understand, and love the people and landscape of the American Southwest. — Louise Rodríguez Connal Learn More Baca, Jimmy Santiago. A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet. New York: Grove Press, 2001. In this memoir, Baca recounts his youth and five-year prison sentence on a drug charge. He began writing poetry while in prison, and his writing enabled him to rehabilitate his life. _______. Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet in the Barrio. Santa Fe: Red Crane Books, 1992. A collection of essays in 104

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which Baca explores his ethnic identity, describing his early life in a New Mexican barrio, the experience of writing, and the redemptive power of poetry. Coppola, Vincent. “The Moon in Jimmy Baca.” Esquire, June, 1993, 48-56. A revealing profile that links the poet’s life with his work. Gish, Robert Franklin. Beyond Bounds: Cross-Cultural Essays on Anglo, American Indian, and Chicano Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Contains an informative essay on Baca’s use of the myth of the legendary city of Aztlán and his consideration of the sociology of the border. Gonzalez, Ray, ed. After Aztlán: Latino Poets of the Nineties. Boston: David R. Godine, 1993. Baca is one of the 35 poets included in this anthology and examination of Latino poetry. Levertov, Denise. Introduction to Martín; &, Meditations on the South Valley, by Jimmy Santiago Baca. New York: New Directions, 1987. An extremely incisive discussion by the poet who was instrumental in helping Baca publish his work. Schubnell, Mathias. “The Inner Landscape of the Self in Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Martín; &, Meditations on the South Valley.” Southwestern American Literature 21 (1995): 167-173. Focuses on the personal and autobiographical elements.

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Raymond Barrio Mexican American novelist Born: West Orange, New Jersey; August 27, 1921 Died: Escondido, California; January 22, 1996 long fiction: The Plum Plum Pickers, 1969; Carib Blue, 1990. drama: The Devil’s Apple Corps: A Trauma in Four Acts, pb. 1976. nonfiction: The Big Picture: How to Experiment with Modern Techniques in Art, 1967 (revised as Experiments in Modern Art, 1968); Art: Seen, 1968; The Prism, 1968; Mexico’s Art and Chicano Artists, 1975. children’s literature: The Fisherman’s Dwarf, 1968.

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lthough selections from his social protest novel The Plum Plum Pickers are widely anthologized in collections of Chicano literature, Raymond Barrio (RAY-mohnd BAHR-ree-oh) is not literally Chicano. His parents immigrated to the United States from Spain in 1920. His father, Saturnino Barrio, who was born in Seville, died after exposure to poisonous fumes in a chemical factory in New Jersey; his mother, Angelita Santos Barrio, was from Algeciras. In unpublished correspondence Barrio explained that he and his brother lived with foster families while their mother pursued her career as a Spanish dancer, giving him a very American Protestant education despite a Catholic birth and upbringing. Barrio met Yolanda Sánchez in Mazatlan, Mexico, and they married in 1957. The couple had five children. Barrio lived in California from 1936 until his death (excluding time spent in military service in Europe from 1943 to 1946). He held academic degrees from the University of California at Berkeley (B.A., 1947) and the Art Center College of Los Angeles (B.F.A., 1952). Barrio taught a variety of courses (art, creative writing, Chicano studies and literature, and Mexican art) in eight California institutions (San Jose State University; Ventura College; the University of California, Santa Barbara; West Valley College; De Anza College; Skyline College; Foothill College;

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Lupe listens. Rocking back and forth in her worn-smooth Salvation Army rocking chair, in the gloom of yet another long sunny afternoon. Trying not to wonder when Manuel would get back from the day’s picking. Feeding the bottle to baby Cati. Bueno. Listening to Manuelito running his plastic car vroom vroom vroom back and forth on the splintered floor. A lucky fever, passing so quickly. Que bueno, for they didn’t have or even know a doctor. —from The Plum Plum Pickers

and Sonoma State University). In 1964 he was awarded the Creative Arts Institute Faculty Grant by the University of California. Although Barrio has asserted that his vocation was art and his avocation writing, teaching provided his family’s financial security. His early publications focus on art, and many of his works are self-illustrated, with sparse text that includes humor and wordplay. When his novel The Plum Plum Pickers was turned down by every publishing house to which it was offered, Barrio published it himself. In less than two years it had sold more than ten thousand copies, and it quickly became an underground classic. The Plum Plum Pickers is primarily a study of the exploitation of migrant laborers by Northern California agribusiness. Barrio illustrates the lives of Mexican, Anglo, and Chicano farmworkers, revealing the attitudes of the corrupt, ruthless overseers and exposing a system driven by the growers’ relentless desire for economic power and control. More than an examination of migrant life, The Plum Plum Pickers is an indictment of the economic system that perpetuates the exploitation of the migrants, the Chicanos, and the illegal immigrants who are often recruited to do the picking. Barrio has been praised for his skillful prose and deft use of realistic dialogue to reveal the hypocrisy and rationalizations of the landowners and the company men. Barrio is concerned 107

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The Plum Plum Pickers Set in California’s Santa Clara County during the summer and fall harvest season, The Plum Plum Pickers takes place in and around the fictional town of Drawbridge, and more specifically at the Western Grande Company’s migrant housing project. The novel presents the inhumane treatment of the mostly Mexican plum plum, or prune, pickers at the hands of the fruit company representatives, Mr. Quill, the grounds boss, and his superior and the company owner, Mr. Turner. The squalor of the migrant camps is a major element of the narrative and enhances the brutalized relations between not only Anglo bosses and Mexican laborers but also different groups within the farmworkers’ Mexican community. The harsh reality of conditions is illustrated in large part by the contrapuntal techniques employed in the narrative (which allow for contrasting views of the same topic) and the frequent attribution of animal qualities to individual characters. Barrio published The Plum Plum Pickers privately in 1969. Its publication coincided with the unionizing activities of César Chávez, and the book appeared to illustrate the very conditions that Chávez sought to improve. The book was therefore an immediate popular success, although it received little critical attention, perhaps because of the poor quality of print and paper employed in its first printing. The novel has since maintained its position as one of the key novels of the Chicano movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. A major reason for this is Barrio’s use of an unusual narrative form, which incorporates such items as newspaper clippings, radio announcements, handwritten notes, and even a government agricultural manual. The Plum Plum Pickers set a new standard for Chicano fiction to follow. — St. John Robinson

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with such gross inequalities in a capitalist system, and he bases many of his characters on the real lives of people he has known. The Plum Plum Pickers was inspired by Barrio’s friendship with a migrant family he met in Cupertino, California, in the Santa Clara Valley, the setting of the novel. Thus the story provides a personalized, sensitive, and realistic portrayal of many of the exploited characters he creates. Ultimately the novel seeks to engage reader sentiments about the condition of the farmworkers, advocating better wages and a release from this modern feudalism sanctioned by free enterprise. To that end, Barrio uses journalistic techniques, interspersing verses from American and Mexican songs to charge his novel with greater irony. Critical reception of The Plum Plum Pickers has been favorable but limited; in the development of the Chicano novel, however, the text occupies a pivotal role. It was the first of a series of works that discovered the potential for novelistic development of Chicano social issues via the use of innovative literary techniques, such as the speaking of English with typical Spanish word order and a distinctive satiric style that avoids moroseness. — Kathleen M. Bartlett Learn More Akers, John C. “Raymond Barrio.” In Chicano Writers, First Series, edited by Francisco A. Lomelí. Vol. 82 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale, 1989. This informative entry provides biographical information, a list of works by Barrio, and a discussion of his major novel, The Plum Plum Pickers. Sources for further study are also included. Gray, Linda. “The Plum Plum Pickers: A Review.” Peninsula Bulletin 11 (December, 1976). This article discusses themes and style of the novel and its social message. Lomelí, Francisco A. “Depraved New World Revisited: Dreams and Dystopia in The Plum Plum Pickers.” Introduction to The Plum Plum Pickers, by Raymond Barrio. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Review Press, 1984. This introduction explores the framework of dreams and nightmare used in the novel and gives examples of the characters who escape the horrors of everyday existence through their dreams. 109

Eduardo Barrios Chilean novelist Born: Valparaíso, Chile; October 25, 1884 Died: Santiago, Chile; September 13, 1963 Also known as: Eduardo Hudtwalcker Barrios long fiction: El niño que enloqueció de amor, 1915; Un perdido, 1917; El hermano asno, 1922 (Brother Ass, 1942); Gran señor y rajadiablos, 1948; Los hombres del hombre, 1950. short fiction: Del natural, 1907. drama: Por el decoro, pr. 1912; Lo que niega la vida, pr. 1913; Vivir, pr. 1916.

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duardo Barrios (ehd-WAHR-doh BAHR-yohs), who wrote about many facets of abnormal psychology, had a varied background. His father, a Chilean army officer, died when Eduardo was a small boy; Eduardo’s Peruvian mother then took him to her native country, and he spent his childhood there. When he was fifteen, he was sent to a military school in Chile, but he had no desire to follow in his father’s footsteps and, after running away from the school, began a series of haphazardly chosen occupations. Among other things, he worked as a bookkeeper in a Chilean nitrate mine, as a rubber worker in Peru, as a weight lifter in a circus, and as a traveling salesman selling stoves in Buenos Aires. During this period, he found time to study the humanities in Chile and Peru, and for a time he lived in a Franciscan monastery. These formative years, strikingly reminiscent in themselves of a picaresque novel, furnished Barrios with an inexhaustible fund of themes and with the broad experience of humanity essential to psychological insight. His literary career began with a volume of short stories that was printed in Iquique, Chile. Becoming interested in the theater, he wrote several plays, among them a satire on bureaucracy, Por el decoro (for the good of the office); several fantasies,

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the first of which was Lo que niega la vida (what life denies); and Vivir (to live), a psychological tragedy that many consider to be his best play. By this time, it had become evident to Barrios that he could not earn a living in the theater, and he turned his full attention to novel writing. His chief preoccupation was always the human personality, and he excelled in depicting people with defective emotional structures who are eventually overbalanced and destroyed by them. His first novel, El niño que enloqueció de amor (the boy who went crazy with love), deals with a ten-yearold boy who conceives an infatuation for a contemporary of his mother and whose frustrations drive him mad. Un perdido (a lost soul), published two years later, concerns someone who is destroyed by his own abnormally heightened sentimentality. Barrios did not limit himself entirely to studies of the abnormal—Gran señor y rajadiablos (great lord and devil-cutter), for example, is a more or less realistic novel of Chilean farm life in the nineteenth century—but psychology remained his chief interest throughout his life. Los hombres del hombre (a man of many aspects), a study of multiple personality published in 1950, is characteristic. Interestingly enough, Barrios’s best-known novel represents a complete departure from his usual themes. Brother Ass is one of the few works of literary mysticism produced in Latin America.

Behold me, Master, today as every day, ill satisfied with myself. Beyond a doubt, I am not a good Franciscan. And I am beginning to fear that I never shall be. Perhaps I came too late to this holy dwelling. The world, people, calamity (above all, calamity!), brought experience beyond my due; and I cannot be simple as a good minor brother should be. I am not innocent, I am not ingenuous. —from Brother Ass (trans. R. Selden Rose and Francisco Aguilera)

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Brother Ass The protagonist of Barrios’s Brother Ass (1922), Fray Lázaro, is a novice in a Franciscan order in rural Chile. His name in the outside world was Mario. He chose to enter a Franciscan monastery after he was rejected by his girlfriend, Gracia. Although he has spent seven years at the monastery, he hesitates to take life vows as a friar because he worries that his vocation may not be authentic. He believes that he is wasting his youth and his potential (he enjoys writing), and the religious life is not giving him personal satisfaction. His daily routine of teaching and work in the monastery’s fields is boring and unrewarding. When he meets María Mercedes, Gracia’s younger sister, he finds relief from the tedium of his life. Every day he feels more eager to see her, and he begins to suffer a severe religious crisis when he realizes that he is in love with the innocent woman. He struggles against physical attraction to María Mercedes, but recognizes sexual desire in his love for her. His internal debate is interrupted by another monk’s attempt to rape María Mercedes. Fray Lázaro assumes all guilt for the violent act, and the order transfers him to another monastery. Brother Ass initiated a Latin American literary trend that may be called the psychological novel. Within the realist mode focused on social critique, the psychological novel presents an analytical study of the human psyche by means of well-delineated characters, each of whom represents traits common to all people. The interaction and the clash of these types illustrate how human behavior works, including the ways in which people relate to each other in friendship. Psychological analysis such as this also includes a didactic approach to improvement of life in society and offers a strong social comment on contemporary society. — Rafael Ocasio

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Material and inspiration for it were drawn from his sojourn with the Franciscans; in it, he explores, with great sensitivity and understanding, the monastic life—its temptations and sacrifices and its direct relationship with God. At the time of his death in Santiago in 1963, Eduardo Barrios was considered the most important figure in Chilean literature and the founder of a strong psychological trend in that country’s fiction. He also served for a time as the director of the National Library and as minister of education. Learn More Brown, James. “El hermano asno: When the Unreliable Narrator Meets the Unreliable Reader.” Hispania 71, no. 4 (December, 1988): 798-805. In-depth study of the literary techniques displayed in Brother Ass. Stresses the relationship between the reader and the novel’s narrator. Discusses the use of irony in the plot. Davison, Ned J. Eduardo Barrios. New York: Twayne, 1970. A standard biography from Twayne’s World Authors series. Foster, David William, and Virginia Ramos Foster. “Barrios, Eduardo.” In Modern Latin American Literature, edited by David William Foster and Virginia Ramos Foster. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975. A survey study of Barrios’s work. Provides excerpts of critical studies by various critics. An excellent starting point. Souza, Raymond. “Indeterminacy of Meaning in El hermano asno.” Chasqui 13, nos. 2/3 (February-May, 1984): 26-32. An in-depth analysis of Barrios’s literary craft and the treatment of rape as a literary motif. Focuses on women’s issues. Walker, John. “Gálvez, Barrios, and the Metaphysical Malaise.” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Foreign Literatures 36, no. 4 (Winter, 1982/1983): 352-358. Comparative study of Barrios and novelist Manuel Gálvez; both authors were interested in metaphysical subjects. Stresses their interest in metaphysical issues as ways to improve contemporary society. _______. Metaphysics and Aesthetics in the Works of Eduardo Barrios. London: Támesis Books, 1983. Studies the relationship between Barrios’s novels and his strong interest in metaphysics. 113

Adolfo Bioy Casares Argentine novelist and short-story writer Born: Buenos Aires, Argentina; September 15, 1914 Died: Buenos Aires, Argentina; March 8, 1999 Also known as: B. Suárez Lynch, B. Lynch Davis, H. Bustos Domecq, Javier Miranda, Martín Sacastra long fiction: La nueva tormenta: O, La vida multiple de Juan Ruteno, 1935; La invención de Morel, 1940 (The Invention of Morel, and Other Stories from “La trama celeste,” 1964); Un modelo para la muerte, 1946 (with Jorge Luis Borges, under the joint pseudonym B. Suárez Lynch); Los que aman, odian, 1946 (with Silvina Ocampo); El sueño de los héroes, 1954 (The Dream of Heroes, 1987); Diario de la guerra del cerdo, 1969 (Diary of the War of the Pig, 1972); Dormir al sol, 1973 (Asleep in the Sun, 1978); Plan de evasión, 1973 (A Plan for Escape, 1975); La aventura de un fotógrafo en La Plata, 1985 (The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata, 1989); Un campeón desparejo, 1993; De un mundo a otro, 1998 (novella). short fiction: Diecisiete disparos contra lo porvenir, 1933; Caos, 1934; Luis Greve, muerto, 1937; Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi, 1942 (with Jorge Luis Borges, under joint pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq; Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, 1981); El perjurio de la nieve, 1945; Dos fantasías memorables, 1946 (with Borges, under joint pseudonym Domecq); La trama celeste, 1948 (in The Invention of Morel, and Other Stories from “La trama celeste,” 1964); Las visperas de Fausto, 1949; Historia prodigiosa, 1956; Guirnalda con amores: Cuentos, 1959; El lado de la sombra, 1962; Crónicas de Bustos Domecq, 1967 (with Borges; Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, 1976); El gran serafín, 1967; Historias de amor, 1972; Historias fantásticas, 1976; El héroe de las mujeres, 1978; Historias desafornadas, 1986; La invención y la trama: Una antología, 1988; A Russian Doll, and Other Stories, 1992; Selected Stories, 1994; Una magia modesta, 1997. 114

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nonfiction: Memorias, 1994; En viaje, 1967, 1997; De las cosas maravillosas, 1999; Conversaciones con Adolfo Bioy Casares, 2000; Descanso de caminantes: Diarios intimos, 2001. edited texts: Antología de la literatura fantástica, 1940 (with Silvina Ocampo and Jorge Luis Borges; The Book of Fantasy, 1988); Antología poética argentina, 1941 (with Ocampo and Borges); Los mejores cuentos policiales, 1943 (with Borges); Los mejores cuentos policiales, segunda serie, 1951 (with Borges); Cuentos breves y extraordinarios, antología, 1955 (with Borges; Extraordinary Tales, 1973); Poesía gauchesca, 1955 (with Borges); Libro del cielo y del infierno, 1960 (with Borges). miscellaneous: Obras completas, 1997 (2 volumes).

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he novelist and short-story writer Adolfo Bioy Casares (ahDOHL-foh bee-YOY kah-SAH-rays), who became known in the United States primarily as a longtime friend and collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges, has been credited with introducing the science-fiction genre into the Argentine literary landscape. Bioy Casares was the son of Adolfo Bioy, a wealthy landowner, and his wife, Marta Casares. He spent his infancy both in the city and on the family ranch in the province of Buenos Aires. As an imaginative young boy, Bioy Casares found the night sky, pictures of the dead, and mirrors to be gateways to a marvelous reality. He also nurtured the terrifying yet compelling world of the fantastic through his readings. During his high school years he was par-

There are many leagues between us men and the women we have beside us. I would have sworn that no normal person would ever even look at these yokels: apparently they are attractive to all women. They are young and strong, but are moved only by the most immediate desire or goals. Does a light shine in their laughing eyes? —from “Souvenir from the Mountains” (trans. Suzanne Jill Levine) 115

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Diary of the War of the Pig A nightly card game in a Buenos Aires café opens the action of Diary of the War of the Pig (1969). An elderly group discuss the topic that dominates the ensuing narrative: Members of a youth movement are exterminating old people. On their way home, Don Vidal and his friends witness a fatal encounter with one of the repressive squads of youths, a nightmarish experience repeated throughout the story as Don Vidal slowly discovers his precarious position in this absurd war of the pigs—that is, of the elderly. Soon, Don Vidal feels the threat of his own extinction as the warring bands of youths raid the squalid tenements and attack members of Vidal’s own group of cronies. One friend is brutally murdered in the presence and by consent of his own son, which bitterly divides the group into those who try to avoid the danger by conforming and those who try to rebel against the harassment of the youth-oriented society. In the midst of all these devastating events, Don Vidal finds refuge from his frustration in the arms of Nélida,

ticularly attracted to mathematics, but his love of writing was stronger. Bioy Casares’s first literary work, completed in 1928, was a fantastic thriller titled Vanidad: O, Una aventura terrorifica (vanity, or a terrifying adventure). At that time, he was discovering nineteenth century Spanish literature, the Bible, Dante, James Joyce, and the Argentine classics. Comic strips and popular novelettes, however, also appealed to him. Like most upper-class Argentinians, he studied at the University of Argentina, first in the law school, then in the faculty of philosophy and letters, but he never completed his university studies and returned instead to manage his father’s ranch. 116

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a beautiful young neighbor who falls in love with the middle-aged protagonist. This erotic adventure becomes a turning point in the novel, providing background for examination of the polarization of the old people and their delinquent enemies: “It was as if with her beside him he would be safe, not from the young people—this threat had almost ceased to alarm him—but from . . . the insidious and terrible contagion of old age.” Love, then, becomes the catalyst that neutralizes the protagonist’s pessimistic response to the biological, if not spiritual, process of aging and ultimate death: Young people cannot understand how having no future to look forward to eliminates everything that is important in life to an old person. The sickness is not the sick person, he thought, but an old man is old age, and there is no other way out but death.

More than simply providing a happy conclusion to an otherwise fantastic tale of tragic dimension, the love motif between Vidal and Nélida treats the stock literary convention of the power of love with such subtlety that it becomes a modern parable of frustrated desire. — René P. Garay

In 1932, Bioy Casares met Borges, and a close personal friendship and lifelong collaborative effort began. Together they created the literary personality they jokingly called “Biorges,” the figure who represented some of their collaborative works they published under the pseudonyms Honorio Bustos Domecq, B. Suárez Lynch, and B. Lynch Davis. Bioy Casares began to read under Borges’s guidance, and aside from the literary influence of Borges himself, such writers as Franz Kafka, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and Henry James left a lasting impression on him. In 1933, he published a collection of short stories, Diecisiete disparos contra lo porvenir (seventeen shots at the future), under a pseudonym. 117

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This work was followed in 1935 by La nueva tormenta (the new storm), which was illustrated by the artist and writer Silvina Ocampo, whom he married in 1940. Bioy Casares has consistently renounced his early writing, maintaining that his literary career began in 1940. In that year, he published what became one of the most widely read literary classics in Argentine history, the work that is largely responsible for his fame: The Invention of Morel. The novel, awarded the Argentinian Municipal Prize in 1941, contains a surrealistic atmosphere that, as critics maintain, bears much resemblance to H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). While the novel contains overtones of the gothic, it uses the vehicle of fantasy rather than the supernatural. Within the context of contemporary Argentine literature, The Invention of Morel launched Argentine science fiction, a genre in which that country has excelled since. After publishing several volumes of short stories, Bioy Casares returned to the novel in 1969 with a best-seller, Diary of the War of the Pig. The novel, radically different from his earlier works, focuses on Argentine reality and the destiny of humankind. It is a somber work that portrays a world in which a human being has no right to grow old, yet the work also contains the elements of hope and love. This novel was followed in 1973 by Asleep in the Sun, for which Bioy Casares won the much-coveted Argentinian Society of Writers Prize. In this novel, the author returned again to the fantastic genre, the gothic, and the pseudoscientific (phrenology). Compared with the bleak irony of Diary of the War of the Pig, this novel is one of light humor and displays great imagination in its hallucinatory fantasies. Although some critics maintain that Bioy Casares’s plots are overly ambiguous and complex, others consider his strength to lie in his complex humor. Adolfo Bioy Casares died in 1999. He will probably best be remembered for his works of the 1940’s and 1950’s, works that experiment with narrative voice and discourse and innovatively blend science fiction and fantasy. In these works, the author clearly foreshadowed the Latin American “new narrative” of the 1970’s. — Genevieve Slomski and Emil Volek 118

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Learn More Bach, Caleb. “The Inventions of Adolfo Bioy Casares.” Americas 45, no. 6 (November/December, 1993). A comprehensive survey of Bioy Casares’s works. Bioy Casares’s early years as a law student and his collaboration with Jorge Luis Borges and Silvina Ocampo are detailed. Camurati, Mireya. “Adolfo Bioy Casares.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol. 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. An essay on the life and career of Bioy Casares. Includes analysis of his works and a bibliography. Coleman, Alexander. “Fantastic Argentine.” The New Criterion 13, no. 2 (October, 1994). Coleman profiles Bioy Casares and focuses on his fictional works. Hernández Martin, Jorge. Readers and Labyrinths: Detective Fiction in Borges, Bustos Domencq, and Eco. New York: Garland, 1995. Examines the Isidro Parodi detective stories written by Bioy Casares and Borges. Levine, Susanne J. “Parody Island: Two Novels by Bioy Casares.” Hispanic Journal 4, no. 2 (Spring, 1983). Compares The Invention of Morel and A Plan for Escape. Meehan, Thomas C. “Temporal Simultaneity and the Theme of Time Travel in a Fantastic Story by Adolfo Bioy Casares.” Romance Quarterly 30, no. 2 (1983). The motif of time travel is studied. Snook, Margaret L. In Search of Self: Gender and Identity in Bioy Casares’s Fantastic Fiction. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Snook analyzes gender and identity issues in Bioy Casares’s fiction. A close reading and psychological interpretation of his major works.

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María Luisa Bombal Chilean novelist Born: Viña del Mar, Chile; June 8, 1910 Died: Santiago, Chile; May 6, 1980 long fiction: La última niebla, 1934 (The Final Mist, 1982; previously revised and translated as The House of Mist, 1947); La amortajada, 1938 (revised and translated as The Shrouded Woman, 1948); La historia de María Griselda, 1977. short fiction: New Islands, and Other Stories, 1982.

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aría Luisa Bombal (mah-REE-ah LWEE-sah bohm-BAHL) is one of the best-known Chilean fiction writers. She was born in Viña del Mar, Chile, on June 8, 1910. Her father died when she was nine years old, and at the age of twelve she traveled to Paris with her mother and sisters. She received most of her formal education in France, earning a degree in French literature from the Sorbonne. The years in France had a profound effect on Bombal’s literary development: She was exposed to the work of many avant-garde artists; she attended lectures by Paul Valéry, studied violin with Jacques Thibaud, and was a member of Fortunat Strowsky’s literary workshop, where she won her first prize as an author for a story written in French. She also continued to read and write in Spanish, a language which she referred to as a secret love, a natural impulse to be cultivated in private. Among the books she would later speak of as important to her development were Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1779), Ricardo Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra (1926; Don Segundo Sombra: Shadows on the Pampas,1935), and the novels of Selma Lagerlöf. She would later be profoundly moved by her readings of Virginia Woolf’s fiction and essays. When one of her uncles discovered in 1931 that she was acting at L’Atelier, a theater workshop directed by Charles Dullin,

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Bombal was abruptly sent back to Chile. She moved to Buenos Aires two years later, accompanying her longtime friend poet Pablo Neruda and his wife. She became a part of the group of illustrious writers gathered around Victoria Ocampo and her magazine, Sur, and much of her fiction first appeared in the pages of this publication. She became friends with other writers such as Federico García Lorca, Alfonsina Storni, Conrado Nalé Roxlo, and Jorge Luis Borges. In 1934, Bombal wrote her first novel, The Final Mist, while she shared a kitchen table with Neruda, who was working on Residencia en la tierra (3 volumes: 1933, 1935, 1947; Residence on Earth, and Other Poems, 1946, 1973). Both of these books were landmarks in Latin American literature at the time of their publication. The Final Mist, pub-

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lished in 1934, incorporated techniques of French avant-garde writing in order to depict Latin American reality in a new way. The book startled and excited its readers with its new possibilities of perception and description. The Final Mist is a narrator’s account of her life within a sterile marriage and the dreams, hopes, and fantasies that make her survival possible. In the novel, there is no clear dividing line between concrete facts and fantastic imaginings. Reality is a mysterious mixture of factual events, dreams, and fantasies. Subjectivity and objectivity cannot be defined separately, and the fusion is both lyrical and ambiguous. At first, the novel seems to be an account of the narrator’s escape from an oppressively loveless marriage into a romantic love affair, but later in the novel, it seems more likely that she has invented her lover, that she has imposed a dreamworld upon an otherwise unbearable existence. The uncertainty is never resolved but becomes part of a misty, dreamlike, even supernatural landscape, a shadowy drama of light and dark, ice and fire, life and death. The novel is both the story of a frustrated woman and a depiction of the new dimension she creates for herself. A second novel, The Shrouded Woman, was published in 1938. Another mysterious realm is explored as the narrator, who has just died, moves back through her memories of life and forward

Only two days ago the young girl laid out in that white coffin was sitting under the vine arbor coloring postcards. And now she is imprisoned in a long wooden casket, the top of which has a built-in window so that her acquaintances may contemplate her last expression. I approach and look, seeing for the first time the face of the dead. —from The Final Mist (trans. Richard and Lucia Cunningham) 122

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into a new dimension of death. Past and present are juxtaposed, the factual and the imaginary, the concrete and the supernatural. As in The Final Mist, a new reality is created from the complex fusion of the feminine and the fantastic. Both The Final Mist and The Shrouded Woman portray woman’s role in society as a powerless one: Men make the important life choices, and women must cope with them as best they can, by drawing on their creative, intuitive imaginations and on their sense of physical fusion with the universe. The rational logic of men limits them to a factual plane, whereas women are in touch with primordial depths of emotional coherence which cannot be defined in rational, scientific terms. In 1939, Bombal made a short visit to the United States, where she met William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, and Erskine Caldwell. That same year, Sur published “New Islands” and “The Tree,” Bombal’s most acclaimed and most anthologized story. Back in Buenos Aires, Bombal married the Argentine painter Jorge Larcos, from whom she was separated two years later. She later married Count Fal de Saint-Phalle, an international banker, with whom she lived for thirty years in the United States, not returning to Chile until after his death in 1970. They had one daughter, Brigitte, who became a professor of mathematics. In 1946, Sur published “The Story of María Griselda” and Bombal rewrote her first novel into a much longer English version published under the title The House of Mist in 1947. She and her husband also rewrote and extended her second novel in an English version, and The Shrouded Woman was published in the United States in 1948. The novels did not meet with great critical success in the English editions, but they have continued to be highly acclaimed in their spare and lyrical Spanish originals. For years, Bombal said that she was working on a novel, “El Canciller,” which she had written originally in English in 1954 as “The Foreign Minister” but not published. She also spoke of writing poetry, stories, film scripts, and another novel, “Embrujo y el Señor de Mayo” (enchantment and Mr. de Mayo), about an earthquake in Chile. A children’s story, “La Maja y el ruiseñor” (La Maja and the nightingale), was published in 1960. In 1977, 123

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“The Tree” Bombal’s best-known story is perhaps “El árbol” (“The Tree”), a self-conscious narrative manipulation of the interaction between past and present. The story begins in the present tense as the protagonist, Brigida, who, while listening to a concert piece, recalls allowing herself to be led into marrying a friend of her father’s. The second concert piece leads her back to her marriage and the tree outside her dressing room window, whose foliage is reflected in her mirrors, creating the illusion of an infinite forest. As she listens to the third piece, the music intermingles in her memory with rain hissing through the leaves of the rubber tree. Brigida’s husband, Luis, knows she does not love him, but he says it is not convenient for them to separate. Just when she feels an unexpected sense of fulfillment and placidity, knowing she can live without hope or fear, she hears a thunderous noise. At this point the reader is made aware of the simultaneity of the past and present by the line “The Intermission? No. The rubber tree.” The concert hall is ablaze with light and the audience files out, but she is imprisoned in the “web of her past,” trapped in her dressing room, which has been flooded by a terrifying white light. Because her husband has had the rubber tree outside her window chopped down, the light reveals all the ugliness and shabbiness of things. Feeling he has stolen her intimacy, her secret, she leaves him. The thematic focus of the story is a childlike mode of perception that is poetic and atemporal, lost in the shadows of desire and the imagination. Brigida’s preference for the shadowy romantic world of her dressing room over the brightly lit external reality makes her unfit for practical experience. However, the story does not suggest that Brigida’s obsession with the shadows made by the tree is an escape but rather that her desire for romantic love and loss of self in dream or passion is justifiable. — Charles E. May

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Bombal was awarded the prize of the Academia Chilena de la Lengua, and in 1979 she won the Joaquin Edwards Bello Regional Literature Prize. She was ill for many years and died in a hospital in Santiago on May 6, 1980. A collection of her short stories in English translation, published in 1982 under the title New Islands and Other Stories, includes the translation of the Spanish original version of The Final Mist. Since her death, Bombal has been one of the most discussed and critically analyzed of the contemporary Latin American writers, and it is appropriate that one of the major Chilean literary prizes has been named the María Luisa Bombal Award. — Mary G. Berg Learn More Agosín, Marjorie. “María Luisa Bombal: O, El lenguaje alucinado.” Symposium 48 (Winter, 1995): 251-256. In this special issue on Latin American women writers, Agosín argues that Bombal challenged the conventional writing of her time by creating a language that moved back and forth between hallucination and daydream; says her female characters are marginalized women who seek the meaning of their lives through imagination and memory. Boyle, Catherine. “The Fragile Perfection of the Shrouded Rebellion: Re-reading Passivity in María Luisa Bombal.” In Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Spain and Spanish America, edited by Catherine Davies. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1993. An examination of the treatment of women and death in The Shrouded Woman. Diaz, Gwendolyn. “Desire and Discourse in María Luisa Bombal’s New Islands.” Hispanofila 112 (September, 1994): 51-62. Discusses the stories in New Islands and Other Stories as examples of Bombal’s experimentation with a new language that reflects a woman’s point of view and thought; argues that the heroine of the stories struggles to place her own perceptions in a world of phallocentric social structures; contends Bombal wants to create a new rhythm that reflects a more complete view of a world previously divided by sexual hierarchies. 125

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Kostopulos-Cooperman, Celeste. The Lyrical Vision of María Luisa Bombal. London: Tamesis Books, 1988. A brief monograph on the lyrical and poetic qualities of Bombal’s fiction. Discusses Bombal’s central thematic preoccupation of women in relationship to their surrounding worlds. Argues that both technically and thematically Bombal was clearly ahead of her time. Provides detailed discussions of “New Islands” and “The Tree.” Mendez Rodenas, Adriana. “Narcissus in Bloom: The Desiring Subject in Modern Latin American Narrative: María Luisa Bombal and Juan Rulfo.” In Latin American Women’s Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis, edited by Anny Brooksbank Jones and Catherine Davies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Mendez Rodenas applies psychoanalytic theory and a feminist approach to Bombal’s fiction. She compares Bombal’s use of the Narcissus myth in The Shrouded Woman. Compares her use of the Narcissus theme with Juan Rulfo’s use of the myth in Pedro Páramo. Rivero, Isel. “Among Generals, Bishops, and Guerillas.” Ms. 1 (May/June, 1991): 70-72. An article on Latin American women writers, noting that while they still wrestle with the process of day-to-day living, their stories are breaking the silence their sisters have endured for so long; discusses the work of several writers, including Bombal, Isabel Allende, and Victoria Ocampo.

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Jorge Luis Borges Argentine short-story writer Born: Buenos Aires, Argentina; August 24, 1899 Died: Geneva, Switzerland; June 14, 1986 Also known as: H. Bustos Domecq, B. Suárez Lynch short fiction: Historia universal de la infamia, 1935 (A Universal History of Infamy, 1972); El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, 1941; Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi, 1942 (with Adolfo Bioy Casares, under joint pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq; Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, 1981); Ficciones, 1935-1944, 1944 (English translation, 1962); Dos fantasías memorables, 1946 (with Bioy Casares, under joint pseudonym Domecq); El Aleph, 1949, 1952 (translated in The Aleph, and Other Stories, 1933-1969, 1970); La muerte y la brújula, 1951; La hermana de Eloísa, 1955 (with Luisa Mercedes Levinson); Cuentos, 1958; Crónicas de Bustos Domecq, 1967 (with Bioy Casares; Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, 1976); El informe de Brodie, 1970 (Doctor Brodie’s Report, 1972); El matrero, 1970; El congreso, 1971 (The Congress, 1974); El libro de arena, 1975 (The Book of Sand, 1977); Narraciones, 1980. long fiction: Un modelo para la muerte, 1946 (with Adolfo Bioy Casares, under joint pseudonym B. Suárez Lynch). screenplays: “Los orilleros” y “El paraíso de los creyentes,” 1955 (with Bioy Casares); Les Autres, 1974 (with Bioy Casares and Hugo Santiago). poetry: Fervor de Buenos Aires, 1923, 1969; Luna de enfrente, 1925; Cuaderno San Martín, 1929; Poemas, 1923-1943, 1943; Poemas, 1923-1953, 1954; Obra poética, 1923-1958, 1958; Obra poética, 1923-1964, 1964; Seis poemas escandinavos, 1966; Siete poemas, 1967; El otro, el mismo, 1969; Elogio de la sombra, 1969 (In Praise of Darkness, 1974); El oro de los tigres, 1972 (translated in The Gold of Tigers: Selected Later Poems, 1977); La rosa profunda, 1975 (translated in The Gold of Tigers); La moneda de hierro, 127

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1976; Historia de la noche, 1977; La cifra, 1981; Los conjurados, 1985; Selected Poems, 1999. nonfiction: Inquisiciones, 1925; El tamaño de mi esperanza, 1926; El idioma de los argentinos, 1928; Evaristo Carriego, 1930 (English translation, 1984); Figari, 1930; Discusión, 1932; Las Kennigar, 1933; Historia de la eternidad, 1936; Nueva refutación del tiempo, 1947; Aspectos de la literatura gauchesca, 1950; Antiguas literaturas germánicas, 1951 (with Delia Ingenieros; revised as Literaturas germánicas medievales, 1966, with Maria Esther Vásquez); Otras Inquisiciones, 1952 (Other Inquisitions, 1964); El “Martin Fierro,” 1953 (with Margarita Guerrero); Leopoldo Lugones, 1955 (with Betina Edelberg); Manual de zoología fantástica, 1957 (with Guerrero; The Imaginary Zoo, 1969; revised as El libro de los seres imaginarios, 1967, The Book of Imaginary Beings, 1969); La poesía gauchesca, 1960; Introducción a la literatura norteamericana, 1967 (with Esther Zemborain de Torres; An Introduction to American Literature, 1971); Prólogos, 1975; ¿Qué es el budismo?, 1976 (with Alicia Jurado); Cosmogonías, 1976; Libro de sueños, 1976; Siete noches, 1980 (Seven Nights, 1984); Nueve ensayos dantescos, 1982; The Total Library: Non-fiction, 1922-1986, 2001 (Eliot Weinberger, editor). translations: Orlando, 1937 (of Virginia Woolf’s novel); La metamórfosis, 1938 (of Franz Kafka’s novel Die Verwandlung); Un bárbaro en Asia, 1941 (of Henri Michaux’s travel notes); Los mejores cuentos policiales, 1943 (with Bioy Casares; of detective stories by various authors); Bartleby, el escribiente, 1943 (of Herman Melville’s novella Bartleby the Scrivener); Los mejores cuentos policiales, segunda serie, 1951 (with Bioy Casares; of detective stories by various authors); Cuentos breves y extraordinarios, 1955, 1973 (with Bioy Casares; of short stories by various authors; Extraordinary Tales, 1973); Las palmeras salvajes, 1956 (of William Faulkner’s novel The Wild Palms); Hojas de hierba, 1969 (of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass). edited texts: Antología clásica de la literatura argentina, 1937; Antología de la literatura fantástica, 1940 (with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo); Antología poética argentina, 1941 (with Bioy Casares and Ocampo); El compadrito: Su destino, sus barrios, su música, 1945, 1968 (with Silvina Bullrich); Poesía 128

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gauchesca, 1955 (with Bioy Casares; 2 volumes); Libro del cielo y del infierno, 1960, 1975 (with Bioy Casares); Versos, 1972 (by Evaristo Carriego); Antología poética, 1982 (by Franciso de Quevedo); Antología poética, 1982 (by Leopoldo Lugones); El amigo de la muerte, 1984 (by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón). miscellaneous: Obras completas, 1953-1967 (10 volumes); Antología personal, 1961 (A Personal Anthology, 1967); Labyrinths: Selected Stories, and Other Writings, 1962, 1964; Nueva antología personal, 1968; Selected Poems, 1923-1967, 1972 (also includes prose); Adrogue, 1977; Obras completas en colaboración, 1979 (with others); Borges: A Reader, 1981; Atlas, 1984 (with María Kodama; English translation, 1985).

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orge Luis Borges (HOR-hay lwees BOHR-hays), South America’s most famous writer of short fiction, was born in 1899 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the son of Jorge Guillermo Borges, a lawyer and psychology teacher, and Leonor Acevedo de Borges, a descendant of old Argentine and Uruguayan families. An extremely intelligent child who spent much of his childhood indoors, Borges named his father’s library as the most important influence on his career. Based on his reading in that library, he began writing at the early age of six, imitating classical Spanish authors such as Miguel de Cervantes and others. Borges attended school in Switzerland during World War I. While there, he became strongly influenced by his reading of

Out of this city marched armies that seemed grand, and that in later days were grand, thanks to the magnifying effects of glory. After many years, one of the soldiers returned, and in a foreign accent told stories of what had happened to him in places called Ituzaingó or Ayacucho. These things are now as though they had never been. —from Martín Fierro (trans. Andrew Hurley)

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the French Symbolist poets as well as such English prose writers as G. K. Chesterton and Thomas Carlyle. After the war, he spent two years in Spain, where he became the disciple of Rafael Casinos-Asséns, leader of the so-called Ultraist movement in poetry (which Borges introduced in Latin America). It was at this time that he began writing poetry himself. Borges published his first book of stories, A Universal History of Infamy, in 1935; however, his most important stories did not appear until 1941, when they were published under the title El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (the garden of the forking paths). When his third collection of stories, Ficciones, 1935-1944, was

Washington Post; reprinted by permission of the D. C. Public Library

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published in 1944, he was awarded a literary prize by the Argentine Society of Writers. Because of increasing blindness, he was forced to stop reading and writing in the late 1950’s; however, his mother became his secretary, and he continued to work by dictating to her. In 1961, Borges was awarded the Formentor Prize, a major European literary honor, in conjunction with Samuel Beckett. As a result of this recognition, his international reputation began to grow rapidly; he was invited to the United States to give several lectures. Soon after, translations of his books began to appear, and he received a number of honorary doctorates and literary prizes from universities and professional societies. Borges died in Geneva, Switzerland, on June 14, 1986. Jorge Luis Borges might well be called a writer’s writer, for the subject of his stories is more often the nature of writing itself than actual events in the world. By the same token, Borges should be seen as a metaphysical writer, for his stories most often focus on the fantastic metaphysical paradoxes that ensnare those who think. Because of his overriding interest in aesthetic and metaphysical reality, his stories often resemble fables or essays. One of his best-known stories, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” deals with a French writer who decides to write Don Quixote in spite of the fact that it has already been written by Cervantes. Borges then compares the two versions and finds them identical; however, he argues that the second version is richer, more ambitious, and in many ways more subtle than Cervantes’s original. In another well-known story, “Funes the Memorious,” Borges presents a character who is unable to forget details of his experience, no matter how small. If the situations of these two men seem alien to ordinary human experience, it is because Borges was interested in the extraordinary nature of metaphysical rather than physical reality. The fact that Pierre Menard can rewrite Don Quixote from the original yet create a more complex and subtle work can be attributed to the notion that one reads a present work with all previous works inscribed within it. The fact that Funes is condemned to remember every single detail of his experience 131

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“Death and the Compass” “La muerte y la brújula” (“Death and the Compass”) is one of the most popular of the stories found in Borges’s Ficciones, 1935-1944 (1944). In it, detective Erik Lönnrot is faced with the task of solving three apparent murders that have taken place exactly one month apart at locations that form a geographical equilateral triangle. The overly rational Lönnrot, through elaborate reasoning, divines when and where the next murder is to take place. He goes there to prevent the murder and to capture the murderer, only to find himself captured, having been lured to the scene by his archenemy, Red Scharlach. This story is a perfect example of Borges’s ability to take a standard subgenre, in this case the detective story, and give it his own personal signature, as the story is replete with Borgesian trademarks. The most prominent of these concerns irony and hubris. Following the first murder and published reports of Lönnrot’s line of investigation, Scharlach, who has sworn to kill Lönnrot, constructs the remainder of the murder scenario, knowing that Lönnrot will not rest until he deciphers the apparent patterns and then—believing he knows, by virtue of his reasoning, all there is to know—will blindly show up at the right spot at the right time for Scharlach to capture and kill him. Ironically, Lönnrot’s intelligence and his reliance (or over-reliance) on reasoning, accompanied by his self-assurance and intellectual vanity bring him to his death. Other trademark Borgesian elements in the story include the totally non-Latino content (from characters to setting), numerous references to Jews and things Jewish, and an intellectual content and ambience throughout not typical of the traditional detective story. (Lönnrot figures out, for example, that the four points that indicate the four apparent murders correspond to the Tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters that make up “the ineffable name of God.”) — Keith H. Brower

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means that he can never tell stories because he is unable to abstract from his experience. Borges maintained that human reality is the result of language and game, as well as the result of the projection of the mind itself. “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” explores the intellectual productions of an imaginary planet. “The Library of Babel” deals with a library that is infinite in its circular and cyclical structure. “The Lottery in Babylon” deals with a lottery that transforms all reality itself into chance. Borges’s most common technique was to take previously established genres—such as the science-fiction story, the detective story, or the philosophical essay—and parody those forms by pushing them to absurd extremes. Thus, most of Borges’s fictions are puzzling, frustrating, sometimes shocking, and often humorous, but they are always profoundly thought-provoking. — Charles E. May Learn More Aizenberg, Edna, ed. Borges and His Successors. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. A collection of essays on Borges’s relationship to such writers as Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, his influence on such writers as Peter Carey and Salvador Elizondo, and his similarity to such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. Bell-Villada, Gene H. Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art. Rev. ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. An excellent introduction to Borges and his works. Provides detailed and very readable commentary concerning Borges’s background, his many stories, and his career, while downplaying the Argentine writer’s role as a philosopher and intellectual and emphasizing his role as a storyteller. A superb study. Bloom, Harold, ed. Jorge Louis Borges. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. An analysis of five of Borges’s short stories: “Death and the Compass,” “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “The Immortal,” “The Aleph,” and “The South.” Provides plot summaries, lists of characters, and extracts from critical essays. Includes an introductory essay by Bloom and a bibliog133

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raphy. Designed to provide high school and college students with information about Borges’s most-studied short stories. Christ, Ronald. The Narrow Act: Borges’ Art of Allusion. 1969. Reprint. New York: Lumen Books, 1995. An important study of how Borges relinquishes circumstantial reality to reach the primordial world of myth. For Borges, the fantastic is not characteristic of another world, but rather is the covert essence of this world. Shows how Borges’s fiction is intertextually related to the mythic, fantastic, literary tradition. DiGiovanni, Norman Thomas. The Lesson of the Master: On Borges and His Work. New York: Continuum, 2003. DiGiovanni first met Borges in 1967, and worked with the author to translate his prose and poetry into English. He provides a memoir of his experiences, describing his friendship and collaboration with Borges, and analyzing some of Borges’s work. Harss, Luis, and Barbara Dohmann. “Jorge Luis Borges: Or, The Consolation by Philosophy.” In Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin American Writers. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. Combines and intertwines personal biography, literary biography, critical commentary, and interview to produce a multifaceted look at Borges’s life, works, and philosophical beliefs, and, most of all, how his philosophical beliefs are reflected in both his poetry and his prose. A classic piece of the body of criticism written on Borges, in spite of its publication date. McMurray, George R. Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980. Intended by the author as “an attempt to decipher the formal and thematic aspects of a synthetic universe that rivals reality in its almost overwhelming complexity,” namely Borges’s universe. A very good and well-organized study of Borges’s dominant themes and narrative devices, with many specific references to the Argentine author’s stories. Includes an informative introduction on Borges’s life and a conclusion that coherently brings together the diverse elements discussed in the book. Rodríguez Monegal, Emir. Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978. Biography by one of the Argentine writer’s most prominent critics. Particularly interesting 134

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for its constant blending of facts about Borges’s life and his literary texts concerning or related to the events or personalities discussed. Detailed, lengthy, and highly informative. Useful for anyone seeking a better understanding of Borges the writer. Sabajanes, Beatriz Sarlo. Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge. New York: Verso, 1993. A good introduction to Borges. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Stabb, Martin S. Borges Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1991. An update of Stabb’s Jorge Luis Borges (1970). Though Borges’s early works, including those from the 1940’s and 1950’s, are discussed and analyzed here, emphasis is on Borges’s post1970 writings, how the “canonical” (to use Stabb’s term) Borges compares to the later Borges, and “a fresh assessment of the Argentine master’s position as a major Western literary presence.” An excellent study, particularly used in tandem with Stabb’s earlier book on Borges. Williamson, Edwin. Borges, a Life. New York: Viking, 2004. Comprehensive examination of Borges’s life and work within the context of Argentinian history.

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Ignácio de Loyola Brandão Brazilian novelist and short-story writer Born: Araraquara, Brazil; July 31, 1936 long fiction: Bebel que a cidade comeu, 1968; Zero, 1974 (English translation, 1975); Dentes ao sol, 1976; Não verás país nenhum: Memorial descritivo, 1981 (And Still the Earth: An Archival Narration, 1985); O beijo não vem da boca, 1985; O ganhador, 1987; O anjo do adeus, 1995; O anônimo célebre, 2002. short fiction: Depois do sol, 1965; Cadeiras proibidas, 1976; Pega ele, silêncio, 1976; Os melhores contos, 1993; O homem que odiava a segunda-feira, 1999. nonfiction: Cuba del Fidel, viagem à ilha proibida, 1978 (travel); Veia bailarina, 1997.

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gnácio de Loyola Brandão (ihg-NAH-syoh thay loh-YOHL-ah brahn-DOWN) is most noted for his socially conscious fiction of resistance during the years of authoritarian military rule in Brazil, from 1964 to 1985. He was born in a small city in the state of São Paulo, where he wrote film reviews as a teenager. At twenty, he moved to the cosmopolitan city of São Paulo, where he worked for numerous newspapers and magazines. As a journalist, he covered students’ movements, workers’ organizations, and living conditions in the slums. These concerns appear with some frequency in his fiction, which thematically constitutes a portrayal of life in contemporary urban centers and is characterized by the use of cinematic techniques, elements of pop culture, journalistic language, and documentary approaches. Because of the climate of fear and repression of the early 1970’s, Brandão’s controversial book Zero was rejected by several publishers. It first appeared in Italy, in a prestigious series of contemporary Latin American fiction in translation. After the book’s success in Europe, a Brazilian publisher risked releasing the original, which was an immediate sensation and won a sig-

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nificant national book award in 1975. Military authorities banned it, but a campaign led by intellectuals and publishers resulted in a new authorization. At the end of the decade, Zero again appeared on best-seller lists in Brazil. After that time, Brandão produced several new titles and saw his work translated into English, Spanish, French, and German. Brandão’s personal definition of literature foregrounds “the defense of human dignity and the denouncement of oppressive systems.” He regards his imaginary constructs as “portraits of our time” that should “make people aware of the reality in which they live.” He is not concerned with traditional notions of artistic value or the “literary level” of language. His view of modern society is conveyed formally, through slang and the disarticulation of temporal and presentational structures. Brandão’s fiction probes the life of the city, lending significance to unheroic individuals who represent the masses inhabiting the modern metropolis. The stories of Depois do sol (after the sun) examine debasement, material misery, and associated emotions. Similarly, Brandão’s first novel dramatizes human tragicomedies in São Paulo, with considerable reference to the mass media. Zero depicts life in a large city in a mythical “America-Latindia” and constitutes an allegory of underdevelopment and repression in Latin American nations. In this exacerbated portrait of urban agony, physical and psychological violence abounds. Historically, the most sensitive aspect is its portrayal of the persecution (including torture) of the political opposition. Cruelty and

Of course, the beginning of this story dates back before the Great Cycle of Sterility, which was followed by the Era of Exterminated Children (which is still going on today). My thoughts jockey for position in my head. I can never be sure of the chronology. —from And Still the Earth (trans. Ellen Watson)

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Zero Zero (1974) was written in Brazil in the late 1960’s, during the first years of the repressive military regime that took power in 1964. The setting is a thinly disguised Brazil. Brandão’s novel is really a series of titled, disjointed narrative units, lists, drawings, and graphs. The majority of these sketchily relate major events in the characters’ lives or convey social, political, and philosophical commentary linked to the plot only as a backdrop to reinforce tone and atmosphere. The plot revolves around José Gonçalves’s evolution from vagabond to subversive. At the outset of the work, the reader sees José doing the first of his odd jobs, killing rats in a run-down film theater. Later, he writes slogans for Coca-Cola bottle caps and books acts for a national freak show that makes up an entire neighborhood. Finally, he carries out robberies and assassinations for Gê, the leader of the subversive “Commons.” Other significant events in his life are his courtship of and marriage to Rosa, whose dubious background causes him anguish; his murder of individuals whom he believes are doing him wrong; and his arrest, torture, and subsequent escape. The chaotic nature of the novel’s structure is underscored by the deliberate breaking of convention in punctuation and spelling, seen, for example, in the placement of commas between verbs and their objects and the phonetic rather than normative spelling of many words. The novel’s emphasis on the base and the ugly is heightened by frequently coarse and brutal language. Zero’s chaotic structure, brutal language, pathetic characterization, and bizarre plot all point up the major theme of the novel: critique of the military rulers’ moral hypocrisy, indiscriminate brutality, and paranoia, which subsequently affect the fabric of society, and shape it to the regime’s mold. — Ronald M. Harmon

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macabre cynicism are also seen in the savage pursuit of money. The squalor of the masses is contrasted with the frolicking of the country-club set. In the novel, an anonymous common man, clearly emblematic of the collectivity, gains consciousness of his situation and becomes a revolutionary in search of freedom. While Brandão’s concerned position is nothing new in Latin American literature, his formal reinforcement of fundamental views is innovative. Zero draws on multiple genres and levels: crude reporting, television news, advertising, soap opera, film, theater, satire, and farce. Brandão dismantles the linearity of realism, reflecting social chaos and agitation in a narrative collage that utilizes footnotes, a newspaper layout, comic balloons for quotes, graphs, drawings, and other unusual effects. The novel Dentes ao sol (teeth to the sun), while not as important a work as Zero, further shows Brandão’s strategy of conscious fragmentation in the construction of a worldview. In contrast, And Still the Earth is linear in concept, somewhat like feuilleton or soap opera. This work of quasi science fiction focuses on a Brazil of the future where manipulation of technology is of paramount importance. Dehumanization and social control come into play in different lights. There are echoes of George Orwell’s Big Brother authority figure from Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), but the nation’s colonial condition and destiny are viewed through environmental destruction. The original Portuguese title parodies a patriotic and idyllic poem of the late nineteenth century that promised Brazilian youth a nation of unparalleled beauty and potential. Here, Brandão portrays a fictional future with no country at all. This abiding concern with national conditions and the implementation of innovative but appropriate narrative means to convey such preoccupations are what distinguish Brandão in contemporary Brazilian literature. — Charles A. Perrone and Cristina Ferreira-Pinto Learn More DiAntonio, Robert E. Brazilian Fiction: Aspects and Evolution of the Contemporary Narrative. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas 139


Press, 1989. Includes a chapter on Brandão’s dystopian fiction, specifically on Zero and And Still the Earth. Krabbenhoft, Kenneth. “Ignácio de Loyola Brandão and the Fiction of Cognitive Estrangement.” Luso-Brazilian Review 24 (Summer, 1987): 35-45. A discussion of the theme of metamorphosis in Brandão’s works. Stern, Irwin, ed. The Dictionary of Brazilian Literature. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Offers a good overview of Brandão’s work.

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Aristeo Brito Mexican American novelist, poet, and educator Born: Ojinaga, Chihuahua, Mexico; October 20, 1942 long fiction: El diablo en Texas: Literatura chicana, 1976 (The Devil in Texas, 1990). miscellaneous: Cuentas y poemas de Aristeo Brito, 1974 (stories and poems).

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risteo Brito (ah-rihs-TAY-oh BREE-toh), a notable Chicano writer, poet, and educator, was born October 20, 1942, in Ojinaga, Chihuahua, Mexico. He grew up in Presidio, Texas, which is located across the Rio Grande from Ojinaga. The river, extending approximately two thousand miles from the West Coast to the Gulf Coast, forms a divisional line separating the United States from Mexico. More than just a border, the river is also an imaginary barrier between the ideas, hopes, and aspirations of the two cultures.

Benito smiles as he walks among the dark houses. Not even any dogs are barking, or maybe he can’t hear them. He smiles with triumph written on his lips. His smile, made from a grimace that fools no one, is as clear as an X-ray. The rider moves among the blocks of prosaic adobe. Adobes that were made at one time from new straw and now look like useless cornstalks. Anybody who’d want to make poetry of this is a liar. —from The Devil in Texas

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In the introduction to Brito’s poignant novel The Devil in Texas, Charles Tatum discusses Brito’s life and the conditions in Ojinaga-Presidio during his youth, which spurred the writing of The Devil in Texas. Brito was emotionally impacted by the plight of the Mexicans and Chicanos in Ojinaga-Presidio. These were poor people whose lack of education, lack of exposure outside their community, and domination by the white populace made only menial, low-paying, and backbreaking employment available to them: They worked in the irrigated fields that produced fruits, vegetables, and cotton. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848—the treaty of peace, friendship, limits, and settlement between the United States of America and the Mexican Republic—the Anglo population appropriated much of Texas from the Mexicans. The enforcers of the class system separating the poor Mexicans and Mexican Americans from the Anglos were the Texas Rangers. The Rangers were organized to restrict undocumented Mexican workers from crossing the border and to monitor the behavior of the Mexican and Mexican American population. Ongoing hostility existed between the Rangers and the Chicanos. The Rangers were regarded as protectors of Anglo interests, and they were seen as terrorists by Mexicans and Mexican Americans. As described in The Devil in Texas, the U.S. Border Patrol was considered a counterpart to the Rangers and was equally repressive. When a bridge was built over the Rio Grande between Ojinaga and Presidio, it was the Border Patrol that prevented “illegal” crossings. This bridge, and the continual surveillance over it, restricted passage between Mexico and Texas. In the book, it represents an impediment to the Spanish-speaking people. His early experiences in Ojinaga-Presidio had a profound affect on Brito, which would haunt him throughout his adulthood. In 1961 he graduated from Presidio High School as class valedictorian. Despite his academic accomplishments, Brito was unable to qualify for induction into the U.S. military because of low intelligence aptitude test scores. Like many local Mexican American youth, his comprehension of English was low. He 142

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The Devil in Texas The Devil in Texas (1976) takes place in the town of Presidio, which means prison in Spanish. For the Mexicans who lived there when the town became part of Texas and for subsequent generations of Mexican Americans and Mexicans on both sides of the Rio Grande border, Presidio lived up to its name. The dry and barren land combined with rivalries and prejudice to imprison the workers in poverty and hopelessness. Brito’s fragmented vignettes evoke the brutality of life in three periods of the area’s history: 1883, 1942, and 1970. The first section focuses on Ben Lynch, an Anglo landowner who makes his fortune from land stolen from Mexicans. He massacres twenty-six of his own workers and exploits the rest. Francisco Uranga starts a newspaper of protest against such injustices, but he is scorned as a troublemaker even by his own people. By 1942, the United States Border Patrol has replaced the Texas Rangers as enforcers of Anglo interests and the Mexican American workers have been displaced by the even-more exploited illegal immigrants. Much of this section is narrated by the unborn son of Francisco Uranga, who speaks from his mother’s womb. He has been waiting more than a century to be born, to be the poet and chronicler who leads his people out of sorrow. In the short section set in 1970, the embryonic narrator of part two is now an adult and returns to Presidio for his father’s funeral, musing on his father’s stunted opportunities. He is surprised to see how many of his father’s friends are still living despite the hardships and discrimination they have faced. Their presence raises the hope that his people will unite in a new and victorious struggle. — Lois A. Marchino

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vowed to become literate in both English and Spanish. In 1965 he graduated with distinction from Sul Ross University in Alpine, Texas, with a major in English. He subsequently received a master’s degree in Spanish from the University of Arizona in Tucson. A turning point in Brito’s life occurred with his indoctrination into the Chicano movement. Nationwide, the Chicano movement had awakened cultural pride among Mexican American youth, and the movement was influential in assimilating these youth into American culture and waging war against social ills. Embittered by his experiences in Ojinaga-Presidio, Brito did not intend to return home. He felt compelled to go there, however, so that he could witness the changes he supposed had occurred in his absence. He took a leave from the completion of his doctoral studies in order to return home. Upon his arrival, he found that little had changed. People were still apathetic. Brito’s response was to write about the history of his community and the relationship between the ruling class and its subordinates. The result of his research and lifelong experiences was The Devil in Texas, a fictionalized version of his community’s history. The novel is divided into three sections that represent Presidio’s history in the years 1883, 1942, and 1970. The Devil in Texas was originally self-published in 1976. The book was translated into English in 1990. Aristeo Brito received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1978 and has taught at the University of Arizona, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Pima Community College in Tucson. He has been editor of the latter’s bilingual literary magazine, Llueve Tlaloc, and has taught creative writing. — Vivian R. Alexander Learn More Lewis, Marvin. “El diablo en Texas: Structure and Meaning.” In Contemporary Chicano Fiction: A Critical Survey, edited by Vernon E. Lattin. Binghamton, N.Y.: Bilingual Press, 1986. Examines the narrative technique and the treatment of prison and the devil in Brito’s novel. 144

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Martinez, Julio A., ed. and comp. Chicano Scholars and Writers. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1979. This “bio-bibliographical” dictionary contains information about Brito. Martinez, Julio A., and Francisco A. Lomelí, eds. Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. Contains information about Brito. Tatum, Charles. Review of El diablo en Texas, by Aristeo Brito. World Literature Today 51, no. 4 (Autumn, 1977). A review of Brito’s novel.

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Julia de Burgos Puerto Rican poet Born: Carolina, Puerto Rico; February 17, 1914 Died: New York, New York; July 6, 1953 poetry: Poema en veinte surcos, 1938; Canción de la verdad sencilla, 1939 (Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems, 1997); El mar y tú: Otros poemas, 1954; Obra poética, 1961; Antología poética, 1975; Roses in the Mirror, 1992.

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orn into a poor peasant family in rural Puerto Rico, Julia de Burgos (JEW-lee-ah thay BEHR-gohs), a remarkably intelligent girl, received schooling because of money collected among her equally poor neighbors. Eventually she earned a teaching degree. Her experiences as a rural teacher and her agrarian background added to her deep concern for the exploited workers and for the women subjected to male-chauvinist cultural patterns. Her contact with common people also ignited her interest in local politics, especially in independence-seeking revolutionary movements.

The people are saying that I am your enemy, That in poetry I give you to the world. They lie, Julia de Burgos. They lie, Julia de Burgos. The voice that rises in my verses is not your voice: it is my voice; For you are the clothing and I am the essence; Between us lies the deepest abyss. —from “To Julia de Burgos” (trans. Grace Schulman)

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Burgos is best known for her strongly feminist poems. Her poetry is thematically diverse; it includes an inclination to the erotic and to social activism. Burgos’s feminist poems present a philosophical consideration of the role of women in Puerto Rican society. By such questioning, Burgos explores womanhood issues in her efforts to break away from restrictive social patterns. Her definition of womanhood encompasses multiple facets: the woman yearning for motherhood (which she herself never fulfilled), the social nonconformist who openly challenges sexist traditions, and the devoted citizen and political activist. Her political involvement with the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, which aggressively promoted the independence of Puerto Rico by means of revolutionary guerrilla warfare, added to her poetry a marked sense of patriotism. Her idea of a pure, lush countryside clashed with the realities of an increasingly urbanized and, therefore, Americanized Puerto Rico. Committed to international activism, Burgos also wrote against fascism in Spain during that country’s civil war. Burgos’s life can be examined as an example of a commitment to fight social injustice. At a time when racial discrimination was rampant, Burgos, a woman of black descent, fought such restrictions. Racism was certainly her major problem upon arriving in New York City in 1942, where she lived until her death. In New York, although she was a renowned poet and fully bilingual, Burgos was obliged to take menial jobs. She fought back, however, by writing against such oppression. Her alcoholism led to her early death. Burgos stands out as an early feminist activist at a time when Puerto Rican culture restricted women to the traditional roles of spouse and mother. The inclusion of feminism in her poetic production, which she links to political activism, puts Burgos on the cutting edge of an incipient movement in Puerto Rico and in the United States. It may be more significant, however, that her life reflected her cherished beliefs. — Rafael Ocasio

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“To Julia de Burgos” “To Julia de Burgos” is part of Poema en veinte surcos (Poem in Twenty Furrows, 1938), whose poems focus mainly on social hierarchies and on the relationship between the individual and society. Both these elements are combined in “To Julia de Burgos,” which is remarkable both for the clarity and conviction of its voice and for the conflict and tension inherent within that voice. The poem is a critique of Julia de Burgos as the world knows her. The speaker, who is not—and perhaps cannot be—named (and is referred to only as “I”), accuses this “false” Julia de Burgos of being the superficial, transparent embodiment of the “real” Julia de Burgos, that is, the independent, free-thinking, soulful creator (who is, presumably, the author of the poem). The difference between the two, the speaker says, is simple: The real Julia de Burgos is her own creation, while the Julia de Burgos to whom the poem is directed is merely a creation of the outside world, someone who succumbs to societal expectations: You curl your hair and paint your face. Not I: I am curled by the wind, painted by the sun.

Here, the hostility is directed from one female to another; the speaker criticizes Julia de Burgos’s submission to social hierarchies and ideas of where a woman’s “place” should be. The real Julia de Burgos is the only one aware of the other’s inauthenticity; her accusations stem from a unique vantage point. She has deep insight into the mindset and hierarchies to which her false self belongs, and by placing her voice in the third person she is able to launch a scathing social critique of the author’s own weaknesses, of women’s conformity to perceived perceptions, and of the oppressive nature of Puerto Rico’s upper class. — Anna A. Moore

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Learn More Esteves, Carmen. “Julia de Burgos: Woman, Poet, Legend.” In A Dream of Light and Shadow: Portraits of Latin American Women Writers, edited by Marjorie Agosín and Nancy Abraham Hall. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Examines the biographical elements in Burgos’s poetry. Kattau, C. “The Plural and the Nuclear in ‘A Julia de Burgos.’” Symposium—A Quarterly Journal in Modern Foreign Literatures 48, no. 4 (Winter, 1995): 285-293. An analysis of Burgos’s work. López Springfield, Consuelo. “I Am the Life, the Strength, the Woman: Feminism in Julia de Burgos’ Autobiographical Poetry.” In Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers, edited by Miriam DeCosta-Willis. Kingston, Jamaica: I. Randle, 2003. A feminist interpretation of Burgos’s poetry.

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Guillermo Cabrera Infante Cuban novelist and short-story writer Born: Gibara, Cuba; April 22, 1929 Died: London, England; February 21, 2005 long fiction: Tres tristes tigres, 1967, 1990 (Three Trapped Tigers, 1971); La Habana para un infante difunto, 1979 (Infante’s Inferno, 1984); Ella cantaba boleros, 1996 (2 novellas). short fiction: Así en la paz como en la guerra, 1960 (Writes of Passage, 1993); Vista del amanecer en el trópico, 1974 (View of Dawn in the Tropics, 1978); Exorcismos de esti(l)o, 1976; Delito por bailar el chachachá, 1995 (Guilty of Dancing the ChaChaChá, 2001); Mi música extremada, 1996. screenplays: Wonderwall, 1968; Vanishing Point, 1970. nonfiction: Un oficio del siglo XX, 1963 (A Twentieth-Century Job, 1991); O, 1975; Arcadia todas las noches, 1978; Holy Smoke, 1985; Mea Cuba, 1992 (English translation, 1994); Cine o sardina, 1997; Vidas para leerlas, 1998; El libro de las ciudades, 1999.

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uillermo Cabrera Infante (YEEHR-moh kah-BRAY-rah eenFAHN-tay), a writer whose satiric, imaginative prose has been compared with that of Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, Jonathan Swift, and Laurence Sterne, is considered to be one of Latin America’s most original and influential writers. Born in Gibara, a small city on the northern coast of Cuba’s Oriente Province, Cabrera Infante was the second child and first son of Guillermo Cabrera Lopez, a journalist, and Zoila Infante. Because his parents were founders of the Communist Party in Cuba, Cabrera Infante was reared in poverty, in an environment of sacrifice for the utopia to come. After teaching himself to read (at the age of four) by deciphering Dick Tracy and Tarzan comic books, Cabrera Infante was sent to a Quaker school. When he was twelve, the entire family

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emigrated to Havana. Although extremely poor, he managed to attend high school and study at the school of journalism, simultaneously working at various odd jobs. Receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1948, Cabrera Infante subsequently studied medicine at Havana University in 1949, and again from 1950 to 1954. In 1952, he was briefly imprisoned and fined for publishing a short story containing English obscenities. In 1953, he began writing film criticism under the pseudonym Guillermo Cain in Carteles magazine, of which he became fiction editor in 1957. He married for the first time in 1953 and had two daughters, Ana and Carola. Following his divorce in 1961, he married a young actress named Miriam Gómez. After the revolution of 1959, Cabrera Infante founded Lunes, a cultural journal and literary supplement to La Revolución, the revolutionary government newspaper that he helped to edit. Lunes was banned in 1961, and Cabrera Infante became increasingly disillusioned with the revolution. To remove him from internal politics, the Cuban government sent him to what he per-

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ceived as semiofficial exile; from 1962 to 1965, he served first as Cuban cultural attaché and then briefly as chargé d’affaires in Belgium. In 1960, Cabrera Infante published his first book, Writes of Passage, a collection of short stories that, taken together, construct a coherent portrait of Cuban lower-middle-class life during the 1950’s. The author’s candor, his use of colloquial speech, and the delicate balance between humor and tragedy all foreshadow the style and tone of his masterpiece, Three Trapped Tigers. It was Three Trapped Tigers, the novel for which he is best known, that established Cabrera Infante as one of the most original and witty novelists to have emerged in Latin America. Plotless in the accepted sense, the work develops from a carefully structured pastiche of monologues, some spoken and some written in letter form, rendered in the vernacular of Havana of the late 1950’s. The long and ambitious work (which the author referred to as a five-hundred-page joke packed with puns, anagrams, tongue twisters, number games, and typographical errors) functions on several levels. It constructs an intimate and nostalgic diary of the late-night adventures and discussions of a group of friends and of their efforts at solidarity and political action. It also is an indictment of a society in demise, a grotesque

But there were lights all over Havana, not only for utility but for luxury, adorning the Paseo del Prado in particular, and also the Malecón, that prolonged promenade along the coast, where cars sped by, their headlights shining on the asphalt while streetlamps along the sidewalk bathed the wall across the street, a glowing tide in contrast with the invisible waves on the other side. —from Infante’s Inferno (trans. Suzanne Jill Levine)

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parody of European and North American civilization. As its aesthetic centerpiece it includes parodies of seven prominent Cuban writers, each of whom describes with self-conscious artistry the death of communist leader Leon Trotsky. Reckless punning, agonizing questioning of realistic art and of the possibilities of mimesis, the shift toward parody, and extensive use of local and international popular culture mark this early postmodern text. In 1963, Cabrera Infante published his film criticism enriched by narrative fiction in A Twentieth-Century Job and in Arcadia todas las noches. The next year an early—and much more overtly political—version of his novel Three Trapped Tigers won the prestigious Spanish Biblioteca Breve Prize. The novel was rewritten in its present form when Cabrera Infante became convinced of the incompatibility of literature and politics. In 1965, the author traveled to Havana to attend his mother’s funeral. Because of some political machinations, however, he was detained in Cuba for four months before being allowed to leave the country, this time permanently and without any official position. The manuscript of his novel was censored in Spain, where he lived from 1965 to 1966, and was not published until 1967. After becoming a naturalized British citizen, Cabrera Infante went to Hollywood, where a screenplay of his was made into the successful film Vanishing Point. He was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for creative writing in 1971 and in 1972. While writing a film adaptation of Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry’s 1947 novel, Cabrera Infante suffered a severe nervous breakdown. The author’s self-prescribed remedy was to write several books almost concurrently: View of Dawn in the Tropics, a work that attempts to destroy the myth of Cuban history by creating historical passages as capsules of language; O, a collection of articles and essays; and Exorcismos de esti(l)o (exorcising style), published in Spain. His erotic novel Infante’s Inferno was published in 1979. The work consists of a series of amorous adventures ranging from the autoerotic to various premarital and extramarital experiences. In 1992, Cabrera Infante collected his political and cultural criticism in a pungent indictment, Mea Cuba. In 1995, he published the short-story collection Guilty 153


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Three Trapped Tigers The plot of Three Trapped Tigers (1967) is conceived as a nightclub show, introduced by the frenetic multilingual wordplay of the emcee of the famous Tropicana cabaret in Havana. A number of characters, some of them in the club and introduced by the emcee, narrate sections of the text, with no further introduction or explanation. There is a one-sided telephone conversation, a letter, a story appearing as a series of fragments, and another story in two translations (only in the Spanish original) and complete with “corrections” by the author’s wife, who turns out to be a fictional creation. Cabrera Infante has said that the text consists of a series of “voices” that have no biography, which means that coherence depends on the reader’s ability to assemble fragments into a meaningful whole. Several characters, stories, and themes introduced in the first half are mirrored in the second, sometimes approximately the same distance from the end as their initial appearance is from the beginning. The incidents related generally have to do with false appearances and the resultant disillusionment. One of Cabrera Infante’s major concerns is the way in which the essence of a society can be recreated through popular language. The author insists that the novel is not written in Spanish but in “Cuban” as spoken in 1958. The text consists largely of puns and other types of wordplay, and humor becomes a tool for the attainment of some very serious ends. Reality is presented as a fundamentally linguistic phenomenon. One of the major forces at work within the novel is the Cuban choteo tradition, the tendency to mock everything that represents any form of authority. The author has repeatedly said that the novel should not be taken too seriously, but this statement is also in the choteo tradition. — William L. Siemens

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of Dancing the ChaChaChá, to mixed reviews; Cabrera Infante himself translated the work into English six years later. Another collection, Mi música extremada, followed in 1996. Cabrera Infante was awarded the Spanish-speaking world’s highest literary honor, the Cervantes Prize, in 1997. Although Cabrera Infante and his books remain banned in his native Cuba, he is said to have much influence on younger Cuban writers. While some critics maintain that Cabrera Infante is a linguistic exhibitionist, they nevertheless acknowledge the author’s wit and talent. They further maintain that Cabrera Infante’s neologisms and other techniques of Modernismo offer a critique of decadence while seeming to indulge in it. Other critics assert that his imaginative use of language, his abandonment of traditional literary forms, and his loosely structured narratives are his triumph, his personal political statement on behalf of individual freedom and his major contribution to Latin American literature. The author himself hoped that his contribution to the modern Latin American novel would be “the shaky foundations of a future movement to disrespectfulness.” — Genevieve Slomski and Emil Volek Learn More Cabrera Infante, Guillermo. Interview by Rita Guibert. In Seven Voices: Seven Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guibert. Translated by Frances Partridge. New York: Vintage Books, 1972. A good starting point for research. Feal, Rosemary Geisdorfer. Novel Lives: The Fictional Autobiographies of Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Mario Vargas Llosa. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. A study of Latin American autobiographical fiction that focuses on Cabrera Infante’s Infante’s Inferno. Hartman, Carmen Teresa. Cabrera Infante’s “Tres Tristes Tigres”: The Trapping Effect of the Signifier over Subject and Text. Caribbean Studies 10. New York: P. Lang, 2003. Analyzes how Cabrera Infante uses language to create a style and tone in his novel. Levine, Suzanne Jill. “Infante’s Inferno.” In Voice-overs: Translation and Latin American Literature, edited by Daniel Balderston 155


and Marcy Schwartz. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. An analysis of the English-language translation of La Habana para un infante difunto. _______. “Vistas of Dawn in the (Tristes) Tropics: History, Fiction, Translation.” In Twayne Companion to Contemporary World Literature: From the Editors of World Literature Today, edited by Pamela A. Genova. New York: Twayne/Thomson Gale, 2003. Examines the English-language translations of Tres tristes tigres and Vista del amanecer en el trópico. Nelson, Ardis L., ed. Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Assays, Essays, and Other Arts. New York: Twayne, 1999. A collection of essays in Twayne’s World Authors series. Includes pieces by Nelson, Raymond D. Souza, Kenneth Hall, and Suzanne Jill Levine. Souza, Raymond D. Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Two Islands, Many Worlds. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. The first comprehensive exploration of the life and works of Cabrera Infante. Draws on interviews with the author and his family and friends, as well as extensive study of both published and unpublished works.

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Ernesto Cardenal Nicaraguan poet Born: Granada, Nicaragua; January 20, 1925 poetry: Gethsemani, Ky., 1960; La hora O, 1960; Epigramas: Poemas, 1961 (Epigramas, 1978); Oración por Marilyn Monroe, y otros poemas, 1965 (Marilyn Monroe, and Other Poems, 1975); El estrecho dudoso, 1966 (The Doubtful Strait, 1995); Antología de Ernesto Cardenal, 1967; Salmos, 1967 (The Psalms of Struggle and Liberation, 1971); Mayapán, 1968; Poemas reunidos, 1949-1969, 1969; Homenaje a los indios americanos, 1969 (Homage to the American Indians, 1973); La hora cero, y otros poemas, 1971 (Zero Hour, and Other Documentary Poems, 1980); Antología, 1971; Poemas, 1971; Canto nacional, 1973; Oráculo sobre Managua, 1973; Poesía escogida, 1975; El Evangelio en Solentiname, 1975 (The Gospel in Solentiname, 1976); Apocalypse, and Other Poems, 1977; Antología, 1978; Canto a un país que nace, 1978; Poesía de uso: Antología, 1949-1978, 1979; Poesía, 1979; Nueva antología poética, 1979; Tocar el cielo, 1981; Wasala: Poems, 1983; Antología: Ernesto Cardenal, 1983; Poesía de la nueva Nicaragua, 1983; Vuelos de Victoria, 1984 (Flights of Victory, 1985); Quetzalcóatal, 1985; With Walker in Nicaragua, and Other Early Poems, 1949-1954, 1985; From Nicaragua with Love: Poems, 1976-1986, 1986; Cántico cósmico, 1989 (The Music of the Spheres, 1990; also known as Cosmic Canticle, 1993); Los ornis de oro, 1991; Golden UFOs: The Indian Poems, 1992; Telescopio en la noche oscura, 1993; El Río San Juan: Estrecho dudoso en el centro de América, 1993; Antología nueva, 1996. nonfiction: Vida en el amor, 1970 (To Live Is to Love, 1972; also known as Abide in Love, 1995); En Cuba, 1972 (In Cuba, 1974); Cardenal en Valencia, 1974; La santidad de la revolución, 1976; La paz mundial y la revolución de Nicaragua, 1981; Vida perdida, 1999; Los años de Granada, 2001; Las insulas extrañas, 2002. 157

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translations: Catulo-Marcial en versión de Ernesto Cardenal, 1978 (of Gaius Valerius Catullus); Tu paz es mi paz, 1982 (of Ursula Schulz’s Dein Friede sei mein Friede). edited texts: Antología de la poesía norteamericana, 1963 (with José Coronel Urtecho); Literatura indígena americana: Antología, 1966 (with Jorge Montoya Toro); Poesía nicaragüense, 1973; Poesía nueva de Nicaragua, 1974; Poesía cubana de la revolucíon, 1976; Antología de poesía primitiva, 1979; Poemas de un joven, 1983 (by Joaquín Pasos); Antología: Azarias H. Pallais, 1986.

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rnesto Cardenal (ehr-NAYS-toh kahr-day-NAHL) is considered by many to be one of the most significant poets of Central America. Cardenal is a Catholic priest, a Nicaraguan revolutionary, a sculptor, and his country’s former minister of culture. The author of numerous books and editor of poetry anthologies, Cardenal has seen only a handful of his works translated into English. Following his high school studies at the Colegio Centroaméricana de los Jesuitas in Granada, Cardenal moved to Mexico, where he graduated from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma in 1947. From 1948 to 1949 he studied North American literature at Columbia University. Before returning to Nicaragua in 1950, he traveled through France, Italy, and Spain. Upon

Like empty beer cans, like empty cigarette butts; my days have been like that. Like figures passing on a T.V. screen. And disappearing, so my life has gone. —from “Like Empty Beer Cans” (trans. Thomas Merton)

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his return, he began working in sculpture and shortly thereafter founded the literary press El Hilo Azul. His strong political stand against the dictatorship of Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza and his family (1937-1979) was the source of some of Cardenal’s early political poems, which were published anonymously in Chile and abroad. Other poets opposed to Somoza formed a group with Cardenal, and in 1954 he participated in an unsuccessful, armed assault against Somoza at the Presidential Palace. In 1957 Cardenal decided to turn his life in a different direction, and he became a novice at the Trappist abbey Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where Thomas Merton was novice master. Because of health issues, Cardenal left the monastery after only two years but continued his religious training at a Benedictine monastery in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and was eventually ordained as a Catholic priest in Managua, Nicaragua, in 1965. Following his ordination, Cardenal began plans with Merton to create a small contemplative community in Nicaragua. The commune of Solentiname was established in 1966 on an island in Lake Nicaragua. Painting, sculpture, pottery, and poetry 159

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flourished there as part of an attempt to interpret the Gospels from a revolutionary perspective. In 1977 several young men and women from Solentiname participated in an uprising against the military government. Cardenal had just left the country for diplomatic reasons and was sentenced to several years’ imprisonment in absentia. The commune of Solentiname was destroyed. In 1979, during the final days of the insurrection and with the establishment of a new government formed by the Sandinistas, Cardenal was named minister of culture, a position that he held until 1988. Under his direction, volunteer teachers throughout Nicaragua conducted literacy workshops. During that same period, several Catholic priests in Central America who also held government posts were censured by Pope John Paul II, and in 1985 Cardenal was denied the right to continue to perform priestly functions. Cardenal has received numerous awards and honorary degrees for his work. Since the electoral defeat of the Sandinista government (1979-1990), he has lived in Managua and is a director of Casa de los Tres Mundos, a literary and cultural organization that supports artists from Nicaragua and around the world. In 1995 he and several other leaders renounced their membership in the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). Cardenal’s literary output is characterized by works that combine the poetic with the political, the Christian with the Marxist. Cardenal, with José Coronel Urtecho, invented a new poetic school known as exteriorismo, that is, poetry which is created from the exterior world, poetry which includes exact names, dates, and historical details. At times Cardenal appropriates entire selections of prose from historical and other documents and inserts them directly into his work, creating a montage style of poem which blends theology with history and politics. Through the juxtaposition of historical data and poetic commentary, he deals with the exploitation of those who have no voice of their own—the poor and the oppressed of society. Many of Cardenal’s books have received critical acclaim, including several of those translated into English. These include Homage to the American Indians, The Psalms of Struggle and Liberation, The Doubtful Strait, and The Music of the Spheres. 160

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The Music of the Spheres Like Ezra Pound and Pablo Neruda, Cardenal created his own style of canto, and credited Pound as a major influence on his poetic style. Disparate images are juxtaposed, lyrical and prosaic lines are mingled, and spiritual elements are combined with images of materialism and consumerism, in which commercialization replaces emotional and spiritual spontaneity. Technical skill is balanced by immediate and relevant messages. The Music of the Spheres (1989) encapsulates the canto form. More than forty cantos create a vision of cosmic development that refers to astronomy, biology, physics, history, mythology, philosophy, politics, and theology. Science blends with spirituality to form a harmonic whole. The organization of interconnected canticles resembles Pound’s subdivisions of a poem into thematic units and follows the tradition of the epic poems of Homer and Dante. As a whole, the canticles’ lyric quality predominates. They sing their praises to creation as they reach out to the cosmos to grasp its elemental clues to origins. These cantos chronicle political and economic realities, harmoniously combined with spiritual transcendence. — Carole A. Champagne

In Homage to the American Indians, the poet highlights the spiritual strengths of Aztec, Maya, and other indigenous peoples and contrasts these with the spiritual weaknesses of people of the Americas today. In this work he uses native cultures to symbolize values, such as peace and social welfare, in comparison to contemporary social phenomena, such as consumerism and war. The Psalms of Struggle and Liberation has its basis in the Old Testament book of Psalms, which Cardenal has recast in a modern version. The evils of the Old Testament have been replaced with capitalism, nuclear arms, and political propaganda. The 161

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cry of the oppressed Hebrews becomes the cry of today’s poor and downtrodden. The Doubtful Strait is a narrative epic poem that focuses on the discovery and conquest of the Americas, particularly Central America. The poet uses words from Christopher Columbus’s logs and from other historic documents to re-create the struggles and violence against the inhabitants of the New World. Cardenal urges the reader to see the present in terms of the past. There is agreement that The Music of the Spheres is Cardenal’s magnum opus. Written over a thirty-year time span, the sixhundred-page epic poem combines modern sciences, such as quantum physics and biological evolution, with mysticism and contemporary Nicaraguan history. Mythologies and wisdom from dozens of world religions, particularly those of primitive peoples, are blended with the theology of Teilhard de Chardin as well as with the theories of modern scientists such as Albert Einstein. Ernesto Cardenal has created a unique poetic voice and has used it to defend and support those members of society who are often unable to speak for themselves. His works combine liberation theology and political ideology into poems and prayers that seek justice and compassion. — Donald E. Cellini Learn More Cardenal, Ernesto. “Ernesto Cardenal Describes Sandinista Split.” Interview by Leslie Wirpsa. National Catholic Reporter 31, no. 30 (May 26, 1995): 9. In this interview, Cardenal describes Nicaraguan politics and reflects on the efforts made during the years immediately following the establishment of the Sandinista government. Elias, Edward. “Prophecy of Liberation: The Poetry of Ernesto Cardenal.” In Poetic Prophecy in Western Literature, edited by Jan Wojcik and Raymond-Jean Frontain. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1984. The author considers Cardenal’s poetry within the Old Testament context of prophecy. He notes the poet’s continuous efforts to move 162

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others to action and makes comparisons to the Hebrew prophets of old. Gibbons, Reginald. “Political Poetry and the Example of Ernesto Cardenal.” Critical Inquiry 13, no. 3 (Spring, 1987): 648671. The poet speaks against injustice and oppression and in favor of compassion and revolution. It is impossible to separate the political from the poetic in Cardenal’s work, Gibbons suggests. Kuhnheim, Jill. “Quests for Alternative Cultural Antecedents: The Indigenism of Pablo Neruda, Ernesto Cardenal, and Gary Snyder.” In Pablo Neruda and the U.S. Culture Industry, edited by Teresa Longo. New York: Routledge, 2002. An examination of the references to indigenous cultures in the work of Cardenal and the other two poets.

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Alejo Carpentier Cuban novelist and musicologist Born: Havana, Cuba; December 26, 1904 Died: Paris, France; April 24, 1980 Also known as: Alejo Valmont Carpentier long fiction: ¡Ecué-Yamba-O! Historia Afro-Cubana, 1933; El reino de este mundo, 1949 (The Kingdom of This World, 1957); Los pasos perdidos, 1953 (The Lost Steps, 1956); El acoso, 1956 (Manhunt, 1959); El siglo de las luces, 1962 (Explosion in a Cathedral, 1963); El derecho de asilo, 1972; El recurso del método, 1974 (Reasons of State, 1976); Concierto barroco, 1974 (Concert Baroque, 1976); La consagración de la primavera, 1978; El arpa y la sombra, 1979 (The Harp and the Shadow, 1990). short fiction: Guerra del tiempo, 1958 (War of Time, 1970). poetry: Dos poemas afro-cubanos, 1930; Poèmes des Antilles, 1931. nonfiction: La música en Cuba, 1946 (Music in Cuba, 2001); Tientos y diferencias, 1964; Afirmación literaria latinoamericana, 1978; La novela latinoamericana en vísperas del nuevo siglo y otros ensayos, 1981; Conversaciones con Alejo Carpentier, 1998. miscellaneous: El milagro de Anaquillé, 1928 (ballet scenario); Obras completas de Alejo Carpentier, 1983-1990 (14 volumes).

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lejo Valmont Carpentier (ah-LAY-hoh kahr-pehn-TYAYR) is a seminal figure in the development of twentieth century Latin American literature. A perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Carpentier ranks with Miguel Ángel Asturias and Jorge Luis Borges as one of the major influences on the emergence and international recognition of the Latin American novelist in the second half of the twentieth century. Carpentier was born in Havana, Cuba, on December 26, 1904, the son of Jorge Julian Carpentier, a French architect, and Lina Valmont, a Russian language teacher. His parents had emigrated from France to Cuba two years earlier. They were con164

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vinced that Cuba, independent as a result of the SpanishAmerican War (1898), was a place to create a future away from the world-weariness of the European continent. Both were fluent in Spanish; both were amateur musicians. Consequently, young Alejo was reared to be completely bilingual and with a knowledge and passion for music which permeated every aspect of his later intellectual and artistic life. Asthmatic as a child, Carpentier’s early school years were divided equally between Havana and the rural outskirts of the city, where early direct contact with African Cuban elements of Cuban society was to have a lasting influence on his understanding of his country’s (and the Caribbean’s) rich and complex cultural identity. His first attempts at writing date from 1916. Throughout his teens, until his registration as a student of architecture at the University of Havana in 1922, he produced stories imitative of his (and his father’s) favorite French and Spanish authors: Alexandre Dumas, père, Honoré de Balzac, Anatole France, Pío Baroja, Benito Pérez Galdós, and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. Forced into full-time employment by the breakup of his parents’ marriage, Carpentier left the university after one year of study to begin a career in journalism. Following a brief trip to Paris, where he absorbed many of the new artistic developments of postwar Europe (represented by the works of writer James

Silence is an important word in my vocabulary. Working with music, I have used it more than men in other professions. I know how one can speculate with silence, measure it, set it apart. But then, sitting on that rock, I was living silence: a silence that came from so far off, compounded of so many silences, that a word dropped into it would have taken on the clangor of creation. —from The Lost Steps (trans. Harriet de Onís)

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Joyce, artist Pablo Picasso, and composer Igor Stravinsky), he returned to Havana and enthusiastically embraced avant-garde cultural groups and supported movements of social and political protest. In 1926, after a trip to Mexico and a meeting with the revolutionary painter Diego Rivera, Carpentier signed a manifesto denouncing the regime of the Cuban dictator, Gerardo Machado y Morales (1925-1933). The following year, he was imprisoned for political activities. In prison, he wrote the draft of his first novel, ¡Ecué-Yamba-O! (Lord, praised be thou!), a historically important narrative (thematically and stylistically) in the development of the Afro-Cuban movement of the 1930’s. A unique synthesis of armchair anthropology, social criticism, and formal experimentalism, the novel’s final version was not completed and published until 1933 in Madrid. Fearing for his safety, Carpentier went into exile upon his release from prison in 1927, spending the next eleven years (from 1928 to 1939) in France. There he wrote, developing his craft and increasing his knowledge of new tendencies in the arts, particularly music and literature. He also met many of the leading poets and painters of the Surrealist movement, exploring their theories and techniques while reading, he later said, “everything I could about America, from the letters of Columbus to the writers of the eighteenth century” in order to discover the “contexts” and the “essences” of Latin America. From 1939, the year of his return to Cuba, to 1945, Carpentier’s creative energy was divided equally among music research, writing, and traveling. In 1946, he moved to Caracas, Venezuela, and the fruits of this earlier period began to appear: in 1946, Music in Cuba, the first attempt at a systematic, historical survey of Cuban music from its colonial origins through the twentieth century (a study to which all Carpentier’s subsequent writings are, to some degree, indebted); in 1949, The Kingdom of This World, a novel of the Haitian revolution inspired by a visit to that tiny Caribbean country in 1943; and in 1953, his most universally acclaimed (and most autobiographical and personal) novel, The Lost Steps. In the preface to The Kingdom of This World, Carpentier wrote that the trip to Haiti which had inspired the novel also revealed to him the fantastic nature of the Caribbean 167

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region and the South American continent and of their history: “What is the whole history of America but a chronicle of the marvelous-real?” In The Lost Steps, the alienated writer-composer protagonist undertakes a journey from North America to a South American jungle in search of indigenous, primitive musical instruments. He discovers, however, that magical dimension

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Reasons of State Reasons of State (1974) is Carpentier’s “dictator novel,” appearing at about the same time as two other novels with the same theme: Augusto Roa Bastos’s I the Supreme (1974) and Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975). All three novels have as protagonist a Latin American dictator, and all deal with the issue of political power, democracy, and the Latin American tradition. Carpentier’s dictator, the First Magistrate, is a composite figure, incorporating characteristics of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, Rafael Trujillo Molina, Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar, and Gerardo Machado y Morales. He is, however—or pretends to be—more cultivated than these personages. The First Magistrate spends half of his life in Paris, where he is courted by venal academics and writers in debt. At home he is ruthless in suppressing the opposition, but abroad he wants to project an image of tolerance. The novel, like all of Carpentier’s fiction, is an experiment with time. There are recognizable events that date the beginning of the action in the late 1910’s. It is easy to follow a historical chronology up to about 1927. From there on, there are leaps forward in time, until the finish in 1972, at the dictator’s tomb in Paris. He has been defeated by the Student, a revolutionary who looms as the future of Latin America. Reasons of State is a comic novel that pokes fun at Latin American dictators and their penchant for extravagant expenditures, hollow rhetoric, and brutal ways. — Roberto González Echevarría

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Carpentier called lo real-maravilloso: “the marvelous reality” of South America, where different stages of the human past and different levels of humanity’s cultural evolution coexist in a natural, telluric grandeur which resists description from outside by an old or inherited cultural perspective. In The Lost Steps, the most persistent and characteristic thematic concerns and stylistic devices of Carpentier’s later works can be found: music, architecture, mythology, and the circular nature of time, to name a few. In 1956, Carpentier published Manhunt, a short novel which, like The Lost Steps, reveals his fascination with the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. War of Time, an important collection of stories exploring the ambiguous and complex nature of temporal experience, was published in 1958, and in 1959, the year of the Cuban revolution, Carpentier returned to Cuba with the almost completed manuscript of his second-most acclaimed novel, Explosion in a Cathedral. Published in 1962, the year Carpentier was appointed director of the Cuban National Publishing House, Explosion in a Cathedral is an intriguing, complex attempt to dramatize the impact of the French Revolution on the entire Caribbean and to reveal how, more often than not, the painful and costly process of abrupt social transformation brings about in the end feelings of frustration and disillusionment. In 1966, Carpentier was removed from his directorship and appointed Cuban cultural attaché in Paris. From 1966 to 1980, he continued to produce essays and novels in which his principal social and artistic concerns were explored. Critics at times attacked his work for being too “essayistic,” for having too little psychological development of characters, for the ornate and complex style of his language (Carpentier called it “baroque”), and for his political allegiance to the Fidel Castro regime. Despite hostile assessments from both the political Right and the political Left, however, international recognition of his importance continued to grow during this period. In 1975, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Havana and the Alfonso Reyes Prize for Literature by the Mexican government. In 1976, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the University of Kansas, and in 1978, he received Spain’s highest liter169

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ary award, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, from King Juan Carlos in Madrid. Carpentier’s work now enjoys universal praise. His importance to thematic expansion and technical innovation in the Latin American narrative has been acknowledged by worldfamous novelists such as Argentina’s Julio Cortázar, Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes, and Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez, a Nobel laureate. His position as a major novelist of the twentieth century is assured and is reflected in the constantly increasing number of translations of his works. — Roland E. Bush Learn More Adams, M. Ian. Three Authors of Alienation: Bombal, Onetti, Carpentier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975. A study of alienation as a literary theme in the works of these three authors. The history of the concept is followed by a short description of modern alienation. Cox, Timothy J. Postmodern Tales of Slavery in the Americas: From Alejo Carpentier to Charles Johnson. New York: Garland, 2001. Discusses Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World. González Echevarría, Roberto. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home. 1977. Reprint. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. A good introduction to Carpentier’s works and their overall significance within the field of Latin American literature and in the broader context of contemporary literature. Contains a bibliography of primary works and a select bibliography of secondary works. González Echevarría, Roberto, and Klaus Müller-Bergh, eds. Alejo Carpentier: Bibliographical Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. An important bibliographical source of primary and secondary works. Harvey, Sally. Carpentier’s Proustian Fiction: The Influence of Marcel Proust on Alejo Carpentier. London: Tamesis, 1994. Examines the themes and style in Carpentier that are derived from Proust. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Pancrazio, James J. The Logic of Fetishism: Alejo Carpentier and the Cuban Tradition. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 170

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2004. Primarily focuses on the Jacqueline Texts, published from 1925 through 1927, first-person accounts of trends in women’s fashion in postwar France. Pancrazio describes how these and other Carpentier works counter Cuba’s revolutionary political image and transcend rigid categories of gender, class, and ethnicity. Shaw, Donald L. Alejo Carpentier. Boston: Twayne, 1985. The first adequate critical work in English dealing with the entire body of Carpentier’s writing. Offers a balanced appraisal of Carpentier’s development from his earliest work, through his discovery of “marvelous realism,” to his last, apparently Marxist, stance. Includes an annotated bibliography and a chronology. Wakefield, Steve. Carpentier’s Baroque Fiction: Returning Medusa’s Gaze. Rochester, N.Y.: Tamesis, 2004. Recounts incidents in Carpentier’s life and analyzes his work to explain how he found inspiration in Spanish baroque architecture and how he sought to write in the literary style of Spain’s seventeenthcentury “golden age” literature. Webb, Barbara J. Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Edouard Glissant. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. A comparative study.

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Alejandro Casona Argentine playwright Born: Besullo, Spain; March 23, 1903 Died: Madrid, Spain; September 17, 1965 Also known as: Alejandro Rodríguez Álvarez drama: La sirena varada, pr., pb. 1934; Otra vez el diablo, pr., pb. 1935; Nuestra Natacha, pr. 1935, pb. 1936; Prohibido suicidarse en primavera, pr. 1937, pb. 1941 (No Suicide Allowed in Spring, 1950); Las tres perfectas casadas, pr. 1941 (based on Arthur Schnitzler’s story “Der Tod des Junggesellen”); La dama del alba, pr., pb. 1944 (The Lady of Dawn, 1964); La barca sin pescador, pr. 1945, pb. 1955 (The Boat Without a Fisherman, 1970); Los árboles mueren de pie, pr. 1949, pb. 1950; Siete gritos en el mar, pr. 1952, pb. 1954; La tercera palabra, pr. 1953, pb. 1954; Obras completas, pb. 1954, 1959. poetry: El peregrino de la barba florida, 1928; La flauta del sapo, 1930. screenplays: Veinte años y una noche, 1940; En el viejo Buenos Aires, 1941; La maestrita de los obreros, 1941; Concierto de almas, 1942; Cuando florezca el naranjo, 1943; Casa de muñecas, 1943 (adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House); Nuestra Natacha, 1943; El María Celeste, 1944; Le fruit mordu, 1945 (with Jules Supervielle; adaptation of J. Jacques Bernard’s Martine); Margarita la tornera, 1946; El abuelo, 1946 (adaptation of Benito Pérez Galdós’ novel). children’s literature: Flor de leyendas, 1933.

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lejandro Casona (ah-lay-HAHN-droh kah-SOH-nah) spent his entire life as an educator and a man of the theater. He began his career as a poet but published only two slim volumes, of no particular distinction. He earned the Premio Nacional de Literatura (national prize for literature) in 1932 for his collection of myths retold for children, Flor de leyendas (1933; flower of

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legends). Otherwise, aside from some desultory contributions to literary criticism and a few translations, Casona wrote only for the stage and screen. His film credits include versions of several of his own plays, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem (1879; A Doll’s House, 1880), and original screenplays. Casona was born in a tiny, remote village in Northern Spain to parents who taught in the local school. Casona trained for the same profession and worked regularly as a teacher and administrator until his exile. While stationed in the isolated Valle de Aráan, he began experimenting with drama, both as a teaching tool and for its own sake. After much initial frustration, he became an overnight success with the first performance of La sirena varada (the stranded mermaid) in 1934. Between 1931 and 1936, Casona combined his two callings as the director of Teatro del Pueblo (people’s theater), an institution dedicated to bringing culture to rural districts. Besides writing several short pieces for performances and handling administrative duties, he took part in several tours. He fled the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) in 1937 and began a triumphant sweep through Latin America, giving lectures and directing productions in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. In 1939, he settled in Buenos Aires, where he

In a desperate moment, you kill yourself anywhere. But I, who have lived alone always, I didn’t want to die alone too! Now do you understand? I thought that in this refuge I would find other castoffs resolved to die, and that some one, any one of them would give me his hand. . . . And I began to dream of this madness—of dying embraced by someone—as if it were perfect bliss. I dreamed of entering upon a new life at last, with a traveling companion. —from Suicide Prohibited in Springtime (trans. Adam D. Horvath)

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The Boat Without a Fisherman In The Boat Without a Fisherman (1955), Casona presents a starkly simple drama of sin and redemption. Ricardo Jordán, financier and speculator, has staked his happiness on success in big business. As the novel opens, he is fuming dyspeptically in his office, ruin staring him in the face. The Devil enters, to offer him a deal: Can he kill an unknown man, half a world away, with no risk of discovery? If so, his fortunes will be saved. Jordán hesitates; at last, simply by writing his name, he presumably kills Peter Anderson. To make his little experiment more interesting, however, the Devil lets Jordán hear Mrs. Anderson’s scream of bereavement. The wheeling and dealing that Jordán attempts to substitute for the natural activities of life has, at least on the stage, scant appeal. The underlings who scuttle in to fawn on Jordán after his Devil-aided coup serve to drive home an already obvious point: This is no way to live. The widow of Peter Anderson, Estela, finds no better alternative. She allows grief to take over; she clings to a grimly heroic pride and rules out the possibility of ever laughing or loving again. To complicate matters, she suspects her sister’s husband, Cristián, of the murder, which cuts off a major source of financial help and emotional support. Estela and Jordán meet and begin to fall in love. Just as Jordán gathers the resolve to confess, Estela’s sister rushes in with the news that Cristián is dying. After some wavering, Estela goes to see him, accepts his confession, and forgives him, thus freeing herself from the burden of hatred. Jordán, meanwhile, learns that he has sinned only by intent; absolved of blood-guilt, he finds a loophole in his contract and foils the Devil by naming a new victim: the ruthless financier of the first act. By introducing Jordán to Estela and thereby to love, the Devil has unwittingly set Jordán on the road to salvation. The play ends with the reunion of Estela and Jordán and the prospect of a hard-earned chance at happiness. — Philip Krummrich 174

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continued to compose new plays and began to write screenplays. After a long and productive residence in Argentina, he returned to Spain, where he died in 1965. In his best work, Casona combined an enlightened didacticism with the grace of a born playwright. As a professional man of the theater, he experimented with various kinds of drama. Nuestra Natacha, for example, has its source in Casona’s experience as a teacher and as director of Teatro del Pueblo. It conveys an overt and idealistic message and marks the only occasion on which Casona absolutely subordinated form to an idea. Las tres perfectas casadas (the three perfect wives), by contrast, is an uncharacteristically negative melodrama of betrayal and suicide, complete with an onstage shooting. In Casona’s best work, however, he explored the problem of human unhappiness and examined some of the means commonly adopted to combat that problem. Casona consistently enjoyed a rare combination of popular success and critical acclaim. La sirena varada won for him the Lope de Vega Prize; moreover, Casona answered eighteen curtain calls at the premiere. Nuestra Natacha (our Natacha), a work of less artistic merit, had favorable reviews to go with its unbroken run of more than five hundred performances. Exiled during the Spanish Civil War, Casona took Latin America by storm. His old and new works played to packed houses from Havana to Buenos Aires, and he soon established himself as the most important dramatist in Argentina. His contemporaries hailed him for revitalizing the Spanish theater, and subsequent critics have confirmed that judgment. Casona, along with Federico García Lorca, deserves much credit for this dynamic resurgence, which continues to show its strength. — Philip Krummrich Learn More Díaz Castañón, Carmen. Alejandro Casona. Oviedo, Spain: Caja de Ahorros de Asturias, 1990. A biography of Casona, covering his writings and life. In Spanish. Lima, Robert. Dark Prisms: Occultism in Hispanic Drama. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. In his discussion 175

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of the demonic pact in Spanish drama, Lima examines Casona’s plays Otra vez el diablo and The Boat Without a Fisherman. Moon, Harold K. Alejandro Casona. Boston: Twayne, 1985. A basic biography of Casona that covers his life and works. Bibliography and index. Parker, Mary, ed. Modern Spanish Dramatists: A Bio-bibliographic Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Casona is one of thirty-three Spanish dramatists included in this collection of essays. The essay on Casona includes a biography, a discussion of his works, themes and dramaturgy, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

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Carlos Castaneda Peruvian American anthropologist Born: Cajamarca, Peru(?); December 25, 1925(?) Died: Los Angeles, California; April 27, 1998 Also known as: Carlos César Arana Castañeda nonfiction: The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, 1968; A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan, 1971; Journey to Ixtlán: The Lessons of Don Juan, 1972; Tales of Power, 1974; The Second Ring of Power, 1977; The Eagle’s Gift, 1981; The Fire from Within, 1984; The Power of Silence: Further Lessons of Don Juan, 1987; The Art of Dreaming, 1993; The Active Side of Infinity, 1998; Magical Passes: The Practical Wisdom of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico, 1998; The Wheel of Time: The Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts About Life, Death, and the Universe, 1998.

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arlos Castaneda (KAR-lohs kahs-tahn-NAY-dah) is a controversial anthropologist whose novelistic writings have attracted a large following. He claims to have been born in São Paulo, Brazil, on December 25, 1935. Some reference works concur with this place of birth but list December 25, 1931, as the date. Castaneda claims that he was born into a prominent Italian family of another name, that his mother died when he was a child, and that his father was a professor of literature. According to his story, he legally took the name Castaneda in 1959. Yet United States immigration records indicate that he was born in Cajamarca, Peru, on December 25, 1925, the son of César Arana Burungaray, a goldsmith, and Susan Castaneda Nova. According to these records, he was using the name Castaneda as early as 1951. When confronted with these discrepancies, Castaneda dismissed them as inconsequential. Castaneda graduated from the Colegio Nacional de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and later studied painting and sculpture 177

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For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel, looking, looking breathlessly. —from The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

at the National School of Fine Arts in Lima. In 1951, he immigrated to Los Angeles, California. He initially studied psychology at Los Angeles City College between 1955 and 1959. In the latter year, he became a student at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where he received a B.A. in anthropology in 1962. He studied intermittently at UCLA over the next nine years, earning an M.A. in 1964 and a Ph.D. in 1970. While a student, Castaneda spent five years in Mexico, apprenticed to a Yaqui sorcerer. It was his account of this apprenticeship that would bring him literary celebrity. Castaneda’s field of graduate study was ethnomethodology, and as early as 1960 he had set out to study the ritual use of medicinal and psychotropic plants by American Indians in the southwestern United States. In the summer of that year, he met Don Juan Matus, an aged member of the Yaqui tribe, who was reputed to have extraordinary powers. First in Arizona and later in Sonora, Mexico, Don Juan initiated Castaneda into the ritual use of peyote and other hallucinogens. By the autumn of 1965, Castaneda had almost come to regard the visionary states shared with the old Indian as an alternate reality, one totally at odds with the rationalistic Western tradition. Castaneda turned the notes he had taken during his apprenticeship into a master’s thesis. In 1968, the University of California Press published the work under the title The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. The modest run of two thousand copies excited great interest. The book was reissued as a paperback and immediately 178

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became a best-seller. It was taken up by the antiestablishment counterculture, which viewed Don Juan as a folk hero and Castaneda as his amanuensis. Also in 1968, Castaneda returned to Mexico to show Don Juan the book in which he was the central character. There, Castaneda had more experiences that defied his scientific rationalism. The result was A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan. Other books followed in rapid succession: Journey to Ixtlán, an account of nonpsychedelic-related exercises practiced during the author’s apprenticeship, and Tales of Power, which recounts further and even more extravagant experiences with Don Juan, now joined by another sorcerer, Don Genaro. Castaneda’s doctoral dissertation was essentially the text of Journey to Ixtlán. The Second Ring of Power, which tells of Castaneda’s encounter with Don Juan’s female disciples, was received with mixed reviews. Canstaneda’s earlier writings are linear in their narrative and temporal structure. In later books, such as The Eagle’s Gift, The Fire from Within, The Power of Silence, and The Art of Dreaming, he presents the reader with the process of remembering the events that occurred in the multilayered and multidimensional time he spent with Don Juan. He also confronts the memory of Don Juan and his party moving beyond death and journeying into infinity with their awareness intact. The system of knowledge that Castaneda learned from Don Juan proposes that, by making a minute account of their lives through a practice called “recapitulation,” people can acquire the necessary energy to challenge the objective existence of this world. An essential step in the process of gaining energy involves eradicating the ego and self-importance. As a practitioner of this system of knowledge, Castaneda did not defend himself or his works from criticism. Castaneda’s subject matter and personality made him a controversial figure. Despite his defenders within the academic community, when Castaneda received his Ph.D. in anthropology, the more staid members of the profession reacted as if the University of California had granted a doctorate in magic. After becoming famous, Castaneda gave interviews in which his date and place of birth, his parents’ names, and the entire history of 179

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The Teachings of Don Juan The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968) introduces the mystical character of Juan Matu, a Yaqui Indian from Sonora, Mexico. Born in the Southwest in 1891, Don Juan lived in Mexico until 1940. He then immigrated to Arizona, where he met Castaneda and, in 1961, accepted him as an apprentice in Yaqui sorcery. Until 1965, he instructed Castaneda in becoming a “man of knowledge” through experience with “nonordinary reality.” The teaching required the use of hallucinogenic drugs, and much of the book chronicles Castaneda’s visions while under their influence. The sorcerer teaches Castaneda the procedures for growing, collecting, and preparing drug-yielding plants. Castaneda’s altered states of consciousness frighten and bewilder him, and he repeatedly calls on Don Juan for rational explanations. The Indian counters with metaphysics and insists that his pupil form his own understandings. Don Juan defines a man of knowledge as one “who has, without rushing or faltering,

his childhood conflicted with the official record. Even the date of his Ph.D. ranges from 1970 to 1973 in contemporary reference works. Castaneda maintained that Don Juan had marked him with the responsibility to succeed him as a guide for others in their quest for knowledge. Some critics implied that, because no one except Castaneda had actually seen Don Juan, the books might be largely works of imagination. (More recently, two of Castaneda’s colleagues and fellow apprentices of Don Juan, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar, published narratives recounting their apprenticeships with Don Juan from a female viewpoint.) Nevertheless, some critics were of the opinion that Castaneda was essentially a gifted novelist and that the literal truth of his accounts was not a crucial factor. 180

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gone as far as he can in unraveling the secrets of power.” Only he who challenges and defeats the four “natural enemies”—fear, clarity, power, and old age—can become such a man. He recommends “a path with heart.” All paths lead nowhere, he says, but those with heart make for a joyful journey. Becoming a man of knowledge requires in-depth learning, unbending intent, strenuous labor, and the possession of an ally. An ally is either “the smoke” (psilocybin from mushrooms) or jimson weed. “The smoke will set you free to see anything you want to see,” Don Juan claims. A third drug, mescaline (peyote), is not an ally but a protector and teacher. Don Juan claims that mescaline has an identity of its own outside the user. In contrast, an ally resides within, bestowing the ability to perform fantastic feats, such as assuming animal form. Although presented as ethnographic research and published as a master’s thesis in anthropology, the book is widely agreed to be fiction. The work is condemned by some as a hoax. Whether truth or fabrication, it has been widely read and served to consolidate the role of hallucinogens in Native American religious rituals with the psychedelic movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. — Faith Hickman Brynie

Castaneda attempted to teach at the University of California at Irvine but discovered that he was too much of a celebrity to lecture effectively there. He subsequently led a rather reclusive life, working with a few of his students to present and elucidate the principles of “Tensegrity.” The discipline of Tensegrity, based on specialized physical movements that were discovered by the shamans who founded Don Juan’s system of knowledge, purportedly enable the practitioner to gather sufficient energy or impetus to navigate into other worlds. Castaneda died near UCLA in Westwood (a part of Los Angeles), on April 27, 1998. Castaneda’s books have sold in the millions and have been translated into several languages. Their gripping narrative and descriptive power and the beguiling and awesome alternatives 181

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that they present to ordinary existence have contributed to their popularity. As F. Scott Fitzgerald became the spokesperson for the Jazz Age, Castaneda caught the spirit (or one major part of the spirit) of the turbulent 1960’s and 1970’s and of the New Age movement that emerged from these years: a radical questioning of the values of American life, even of the American perception of reality. — Patrick Adcock and Margarita Nieto

Learn More De Mille, Richard. Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory. Rev. ed. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1978. Paints Castaneda as a brilliant scholar who created controversies out of boredom. Fikes, Jay Courtney. Carlos Castaneda: Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties. Victoria, B.C.: Millenia Press, 1993. Fikes, an anthropologist and an expert on the Huichol Indians, alleges that two rival anthropologists helped Castaneda fabricate depictions of Huichol rituals. Keen, Sam. Voices and Visions. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. A collection of essays that reveal Castaneda’s personal history and label his Don Juan experiences a hoax. Thirty scholars and laypersons celebrate or deplore his influence on academic disciplines and private lives. Sánchez, Víctor. The Teachings of Don Carlos: Practical Applications of the Works of Carlos Castaneda. Translated by Robert Nelson. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Bear, 1995. Provides a method for applying the shamanic wisdom described in Castaneda’s books. Wallace, Amy. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda. Berkeley, Calif.: Frog, 2003. Wallace was a member of Castaneda’s cult of followers, and recounts her life with the group, portraying Castaneda as both charismatic and cruel. Williams, Donald Lee. Border Crossings: A Psychological Perspective on Carlos Castaneda’s Path of Knowledge. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1981. Williams incorporates elements of Jungian psychology, mythology, and comparative religion to portray Castaneda’s experiences in a more metaphorical light. 182

Ana Castillo Mexican American novelist, short-story writer, and poet Born: Chicago, Illinois; June 15, 1953 Also known as: Ana Hernandez del Castillo long fiction: The Mixquiahuala Letters, 1986; Sapogonia, 1990, revised 1994; So Far from God, 1993; Peel My Love Like an Onion, 1999. short fiction: Ghost Talk, 1984; The Antihero, 1986; Subtitles, 1992; Loverboys: Stories, 1996. poetry: Otro Canto, 1977; The Invitation, 1979, 2d edition 1986; Women Are Not Roses, 1984; My Father Was a Toltec, 1988; My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems 1973-1988, 1995; I Ask the Impossible, 2001. nonfiction: Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, 1994. children’s literature: My Daughter, My Son, the Eagle, the Dove: An Aztec Chant, 2000. translation: Esta Puente, Mi Espalda, 1988 (This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color; Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, editors). edited texts: The Sexuality of Latinas, 1993; Recent Chicano Poetry/Neueste Chicano-Lyrik, 1994; Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Américas, 1996.

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ne of the most prominent and versatile Chicana writers in the United States, Ana Castillo (AH-nah kahs-TEE-yoh) is the author of poetry, novels, critical essays, translations, and edited texts. The Chicago-born Castillo first became known as a poet. Her writing reflects her involvement in Chicano and Latino political and cultural movements, as well as her strong commitment to feminist and environmental concerns. Among the many grants and awards she has received are the Carl Sandburg Literary Award in Fiction in 1993 for So Far from God, a Before 183

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Columbus Foundation American Book Award in 1987 for The Mixquiahuala Letters, and National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships in 1990 and 1995. She has taught and lectured at several American and European universities. Castillo began publishing poetry while she was still a student at Northeastern Illinois University, from which she graduated with a degree in liberal arts in 1975. She first published in journals such as Revista Chicano-Riqueña, and her first collection, Otro Canto, appeared in 1977. This was followed by The Invitation in 1979, the same year that she received an M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean studies from the University of Chicago. Castillo’s early poems reveal her involvement in El Movimiento (the Chicano/Latino civil rights movement), as well as her developing feminism and her poetic use of eroticism. The theme of social protest in Otro Canto appears in poems such as “A Christmas Carol: c. 1976,” spoken in the voice of a Chicana facing divorce and poverty amid memories of her childhood dreams. Other frequently noted poems from the volume include “Napa, California” and “1975.” The Invitation displays Castillo’s disillusionment with the persistent sexism of the maledominated civil rights movement. Castillo’s response in The Invitation is to appropriate the erotic, rejecting taboos and clichés through a female speaker who explores and defines her sexuality in her own terms.

talking proletariat talks of pregnant wives and shoeless kids. no-turkey-thanksgivings. bare x-mas tree this year. santa claus is on strike again. —from “Panoramas”

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In 1984, a year after the birth of her son, Marcel Ramón Herrera, selections from Otro Canto and The Invitation were reprinted, along with new pieces, in Women Are Not Roses. Castillo’s rejection of antifeminist stereotypes appears in the volume’s title poem, as well as in “The Antihero,” in which Castillo explores the male need to construct and objectify the feminine. My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems, 1973-1988 is noted for its treatment of Chicana identity in poems such as “Ixtacihuatl Died in Vain” and the political resonance of the utopian “In My Country.” 185

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So Far from God So Far from God (1993) is a tragicomic exploration of the cultural and temporal collisions in the Chicana world. The novel tells the story of two decades in the life of Sofia and her four daughters in a small New Mexico town, blending melodrama, visions, recipes, Catholicism, folklore, and miracles through an intimate, conversational tone that incorporates Latino slang and regional dialect. Parodying the Latin American telenovela, or soap opera, the protagonists are soap opera stereotypes. The plot is filled with ironies, and it contrasts the fantasy of the telenovela genre with the realities of Chicana lives. The novel’s admiration and empathy is for the Chicana—the men in the book are damaged or weak. Fe, ambitious, assimilated into the white culture, and perfectly groomed, is ashamed of her family. To reach her dream of middle-class respectability, she works overtime at a factory, where she contracts cancer and dies. The beautiful Caridad, sexually promiscuous after her annulled marriage, is attacked and mutilated. She uses spirituality to reconnect with the mysticism of her heri-

Castillo began writing her first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters, at the age of twenty-three. Published ten years later, in 1986, The Mixquiahuala Letters is an epistolary novel that records the shifting relationship of two Latinas: Teresa, the author of the letters, and the artist Alicia. Their friendship becomes a record of betrayals through which Castillo explores internalized sexism and the negation of lesbian desire. Castillo’s main characters meet in Mexico; through their experiences in Mexico and the United States, Castillo probes race, class, and gender issues from a variety of perspectives. This strategy is enhanced by Castillo’s experimental provision of multiple sequences in which the letters can be read. Although the novel is dedicated to 186

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tage, and she becomes a hermit, healer, and channeler. She falls in love with Esmeralda, a lesbian whose Mexican roots mystically connect them. The two die holding hands, leaping from a mesa, called by a Mexican deity. Unlike Fe, who was “plain dead,” they achieve a mythic status. Esperanza, a television journalist and the only college-educated sister, is kidnapped and killed in Saudi Arabia. Emotionally connected to the Native American church, her visionary form converses with Caridad. La Loca, the youngest and most visionary, dies of AIDS even though she has had no physical contact with people other than her mother and sister since the age of three. Sofia endures. Abandoned by her gambling husband (who returns twenty years later), she raises her daughters alone, establishes herself as mayor and organizes cooperatives to improve the economic stability of the impoverished town. The novel ends with her founding of the Society of Mothers of Martyrs and Saints as a tribute to La Loca. This act takes a sardonic twist as the society develops into a purveyor of kitsch. Consistent with the oral tradition, the novel relates cherished Latino traditions. As a scathing commentary of the complexities of the Chicana existence, it also portends cultural decline. — Susan Chainey

Julio Cortázar, Castillo’s strongest literary influence was the controversial Novas Cartas Portuguesas (1972) by the “three Marias” (Maria Barreno, Maria Horta, and Maria Costa), a work that inspired Castillo’s presentation of sexuality and her challenge of Catholicism. In 1990, Castillo moved from California to Albuquerque, New Mexico. In that same year, she published Sapogonia, a novel set in the mythical country of Sapogonia, the home of all mestizos. The novel depicts the obsession of Máximo Madrigal with singer and activist Pastora Aké. Máximo’s need to dominate Pastora is presented both as the legacy of the conquest, with the European-identified Máximo playing out the role of conquista187

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dor, and as a function of the cultural position of women who, like Pastora, participate in their own objectification. The 1993 publication of Castillo’s novel So Far from God, along with the republication of Sapogonia, marked her crossover from small presses into the mainstream publishing market. Set in New Mexico, So Far from God illustrates the expansion of Castillo’s political vision to issues such as environmentalism and presents a new focus on Latino spirituality and popular culture. Castillo’s main characters, Sofia and her daughters Esperanza, Fe, Caridad, and La Loca, enact a late twentieth century version of the martyrdom of Saint Sophia. However, while Sofia’s daughters fall victim to war, toxic chemicals, and violence, Sofia becomes a paragon of strength and survival. Although tragic at times, So Far from God, like many of Castillo’s works, also reveals her ironic sense of humor. Many of Castillo’s political concerns are presented in her book of essays Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. Castillo develops a Chicana feminism that addresses the history of the colonized woman, taking into account her sexuality and her spirituality, both of which must be freed from institutional oppression. In 1996, Castillo published the shortstory collection Loverboys, which was centered on the theme of desire, both homosexual and heterosexual. The novel Peel My Love Like an Onion returned to the subject of flamenco dancing and music explored in Sapogonia and delved into the erotic lives of its main characters. Her varied works have firmly established Castillo as an influential Latina feminist writer and theorist. — Maura Ives Learn More Alarcón, Norma. “The Sardonic Powers of the Erotic in the Work of Ana Castillo.” In Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings, edited by Asuncion Horno-Delgado et al. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. Covers Castillo’s early poems and The Mixquiahuala Letters. Castillo, Ana. “Ana Castillo.” http://anacastillo.com. Accessed March 22, 2005. The site includes a biography, list of works, 188

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information about the author’s archives, and interviews (some with links to full text). Delgadillo, Theresa. “Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance: Hybrid Spirituality in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God.” Modern Fiction Studies 44 (Winter, 1998): 888-889. Explores Castillo’s characterization of Chicanas as a group of passive people who become victims of oppression and a patriarchal church, and their eventual emergence from subjugation. Lanza, Carmela D. “Hearing the Voices: Women and Home and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God.” MELUS 23 (Spring, 1998): 6579. Lanza’s essay compares Castillo’s book to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), identifying So Far from God as a “postmodern inversion” of Alcott’s novel. Both novels deal with the relationships between four sisters, but Castillo’s book is “infused with political resistance” where women of color have an opportunity to grow spiritually and politically. Madsen, Deborah L. Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. A close study of the work of Bernice Zamora, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Denise Chávez, Alma Luz Villanueva, and Lorna Dee Cervantes. Includes an extensive bibliography. Mujcinovic, Fatima. Postmodern Cross-culturalism and Politicization in U.S. Latina Literature: From Ana Castillo to Julia Alverez. Modern American Literature 42. New York: P. Lang, 2004. A literary and cultural analysis of the work of Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and Dominican American women writers, including Castillo. Mujcinovic views these writers’ work from a contemporary feminist, political, postcolonial, and psychoanalytical perspective. Pérez-Torres, Rafael. Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Discusses the construction of Chicana identity in Castillo’s poetry. Quintana, Alvina. “Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters: The Novelist as Ethnographer.” In Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology, edited by Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar. Durham, N.C.: 189

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Duke University Press, 1991. A critical treatment of The Mixquiahuala Letters. Spurgeon, Sara L. Ana Castillo. Western Writers Series 163. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 2004. A brief introduction to Castillo’s life and work. Walter, Roland. “The Cultural Politics of Dislocation and Relocation in the Novels of Ana Castillo.” MELUS 23 (Spring, 1998): 81-97. Walter addresses the politics of dislocation and relocation as a “key aspect of interacting social and cultural practices and ideological discourses” in Castillo’s novels.

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Lorna Dee Cervantes Mexican American poet Born: San Francisco, California; August 6, 1954 poetry: Emplumada, 1981; From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger, 1991.

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lthough Lorna Dee Cervantes (LOHR-nah dee sur-VAHNtays) grew up in an urban, working-class barrio, she was raised to speak English because of her family’s fear of racism. As a result, gender issues and ethnicity and language issues play major roles in her poetry. In keeping with such themes, Cervantes describes herself as a Chicana poet, with all the ethnic, gender, and language markers expressed or implied. Furthermore, she means that description to be subversive. If societies label subgroups and individuals, when a group or individual selfdefines, it is an exercise of power, defying the society, which leads to self-determination, an act historically denied to women and members of minority ethnic groups. Cervantes notes that women and Chicanos’ common experiences and challenges are in the first case due to machismo and patriarchy, and in the second due to racial prejudice and eco-

The mountains are there like ghosts of slaughtered mules, the whites of my ancestors rest on the glaciers, veiled and haloed with the desire of electrical storms. Marginal feasts corral the young to the cave walls, purple smoke wafts up a chimney of shedding sundown. —from “Flatirons” 191

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“Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” is probably Cervantes’s best-known poem. In spite of its title and all its natural imagery, however, “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” is really a celebration of the power of women. In language that lifts her thoughts to a mythic level, Cervantes creates a powerful statement of Latina strength and a reminder about those—particularly men—who so often take it away. The poem is broken into six numbered parts; all except the first contain verse stanzas themselves. In the first section, the narrator describes the house she lives in with her mother and her grandmother, who “watered geraniums/ [as] the shadow of the freeway lengthened.” “We were a woman family,” the narrator declares in the next stanza. Her mother warns her about men, but the narrator models herself more on her grandmother, who “believes in myths and birds” and “trusts only what she builds/ with her own hands.” A drunken intruder (perhaps the mother’s former husband) tries to break into the house in section five but is scared away. In the final stanza the mother warns the narrator, “’Baby, don’t count on nobody,’” but the narrator confesses that “Every night I sleep with a gentle man/ to the hymn of the mockingbirds,” plants geraniums, ties her hair up like her grandmother, “and trust[s] only what I have built with my own hands.” The poem is thus a celebration of three generations of women and contains the promise that women can be independent and still find love. — David Peck

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nomic exploitation. This unites either group but alienates it from other groups. While the visionary power of poetry can invoke an idealized, utopian world, the real world is beset by social problems, making social revolution necessary. Poetry serves Cervantes as a form of resistance, another means of subversion. She employs narrative poems to represent the real world of conflicts and lyrical poetry for contemplation and meditation. The former deal most specifically with ethnicity and gender, particularly male-female sexual relationships. The lyrical poems frequently bemoan the necessity of social commitment and responsibility. Language serves Cervantes as a power strategy. For example, she juxtaposes versions of her poems in English and Spanish. She does not translate poems, as one poem is not the same as the other: Each develops independently in its own language. She also employs interlingualism—that is, Spanish within English plus barrio dialect—in order to establish her version of literary style rather than follow canonical traditions and customs. Cervantes’s use of autobiography as a poetic strategy has offended some members of her family, who feel that she discloses too many personal details. Her intention, however, is to record and translate the experiences of the historical and collective ethnic and gender communities to larger audiences, rather than to emphasize her family’s experiences. Furthermore, she sees herself as a mediator between the Chicano community (a largely oral culture) and the English-speaking audience (a largely print culture). In fact, she portrays herself as a scribe in her poem “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway.” Her grandmother is represented as Queen and her mother as Knight. Cervantes earned an undergraduate degree from San Jose State University in 1984 and a doctorate from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the history of consciousness in 1990. She has taught creative writing at the Universities of Colorado at Denver and at Boulder. Cervantes received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and one from the Fine Arts Works Center. She also won a Pushcart Prize, a Provincetown Fellowship, a London Meadow Fellowship, and a Lila Wallace/ Readers Digest Foundation Writers Award (1995). She was 193

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named Outstanding Chicana Scholar by the National Association of Chicano Scholars. She has served as a judge for the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award and as a panelist for Arizona State Arts Commission. — Debra D. Andrist Learn More Gonzalez, Ray, ed. Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today’s Latino Renaissance. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1998. Cervantes is one of the poets whose work is included in this anthology and examination of common themes and techniques in contemporary Latino poetry. Ikas, Karin Rosa, ed. Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002. Lorna Dee Cervantes, Denise Chávez, Lucha Corpi, and Mary Helen Ponce are among the ten Chicana writers who describe their lives and work. “Lorna Dee Cervantes.” In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Nina Baym. 5th ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. Cervantes’s poetry is included in this anthology. Madsen, Deborah L. “Lorna Dee Cervantes.” InUnderstanding Contemporary Chicana Literature. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. A critique of six contemporary Mexican American women writers, including Cervantes. Moyers, Bill, ed. Fooling with Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft. New York: Morrow, 1999. In an interview with Moyers, Cervantes explains how and why she writes poetry. Sánchez, Marta Ester. “The Chicana as Scribe: Harmonizing Gender and Culture in Lorna Dee Cervantes’ ‘Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway.’” In Contemporary Chicana Poetry: A Critical Approach to an Emerging Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Examines how Cervantes and other Chicana poets are reevaluating their gender and ethnic identity through their work. University of Colorado-Boulder. “English Department Faculty Page: Lorna Dee Cervantes.” http://www.colorado.edu/ English/facpages/cervante.html. Accessed March 22, 2005. The page contains Cervantes’s vitae. 194

Denise Chávez Mexican American playwright and fiction writer Born: Las Cruces, New Mexico; August 15, 1948 Also known as: Denise Elia Chávez drama: Novitiates, pr. 1973; The Mask of November, pr. 1975; The Flying Tortilla Man, pr. 1975; Elevators, pr. 1975; The Adobe Rabbit, pr. 1980; Nacimiento, pr. 1980; Santa Fe Charm, pr. 1980; An Evening of Theatre, pr. 1981; How Junior Got Throwed in the Joint, pr. 1981; Sí, hay posada, pr. 1981; El Santero de Cordova, pr. 1981; The Green Madonna, pr. 1982; Hecho en México, pr. 1983; La morenita, pr. 1983; Francis!, pr. 1983; Plaza, pr. 1984; PlagueTime, pr. 1985; Novena narrativas, pr. 1987; The Step, pr. 1987; Language of Vision, pr. 1988; Women in the State of Grace, pr. 1989. long fiction: Face of an Angel, 1990; The Woman Who Knew the Language of Animals, 1992 (juvenile); Loving Pedro Infante, 2001. short fiction: The Last of the Menu Girls, 1986.

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enise Chávez (deh-NEES CHAH-vehz) was born in the desert Southwest, and she writes about the Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Anglo-Americans, and others who provide the region’s rich cultural tapestry. Her works consistently focus on the strength and endurance of ordinary workingclass Latino women. Chávez had twelve years of Catholic schooling and started writing diaries and skits while still in elementary school. She received her bachelor of arts degree in theater from New Mexico State University in 1971, her master of fine arts in theater from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, in 1974, and her master of arts in creative writing from the University of New Mexico in 1984. During her school years she worked in a variety of jobs—in a hospital, in an art gallery, and in public relations. She 195

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also wrote poetry, fiction, and drama, always with emphasis on the lives of women. She taught at Northern New Mexico Community College, the University of Houston, Artist-in-the-Schools programs, and writers’ workshops. Chávez has written numerous plays and literary pieces, which she often performed or directed, including a national tour with her one-woman performance piece. Her plays have been produced throughout the United States and Europe. Her plays (mostly unpublished), written in English and Spanish, include Novitiates, The Flying Tortilla Man, Rainy Day Waterloo, The Third Door, Sí, hay posada, The Green Madonna, La morenita, El más pequeño de mis hijos, Plague-Time, Novena narrativas, and Language of Vision.

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In the darkness there is the smell of my mother’s loneliness. Next to me the portrait of my mother and Juan Luz is hidden behind piles of clothes which are crowded into the house’s largest closet. All those memories are now suffocated in cloth. So whoever comes, whatever man comes, and only one could, he would not feel alarm. But would my father come, being gone so long? —from “The Closet”

The Last of the Menu Girls, interrelated stories about a young Chicana, and the novel Face of an Angel have established Chávez’s notable reputation as a fiction writer. Both works address critical questions of personal and cultural identity with extraordinary wit and compassion. Chávez has a striking ability to create a sense of individual voice for her characters, and she makes that voice resonate for readers who may or may not be familiar with the places and people about whom she writes. — Lois A. Marchino Learn More Anderson, Douglas. “Displaced Abjection and States of Grace: Denise Chávez’s ‘The Last of the Menu Girls.’” In American Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Julie Brown. New York: Garland, 1995. Analyzes the issues of Mexican American identity raised in Chávez’s collection of stories. Balassi, William, John F. Crawford, and Annie O. Eysturoy, eds. This Is About Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. Includes an interview with Chávez. Gonzalez, Maria. “Love and Conflict: Mexican American Women Writers as Daughters.” In Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Twentieth-century Literature, edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Ex197

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Face of an Angel Face of an Angel (1990) addresses the quest for identity of Soveida Dosamantes, a hardworking waitress at El Farol Mexican Restaurant in southern New Mexico. The rich cast of characters around Soveida provides detailed portraits of the lives of Mexican, American, and Mexican American working-class men and women in the Southwest. The work describes these characters’ various struggles to know themselves and to be accepted in a multicultural setting. The novel speaks compellingly of the importance of the individual self and the social attitudes that allow the individual freedom to function. Soveida, who narrates most of the novel, has grown up in Agua Oscura, a fictional small town in the desert Southwest. Soveida explores the boundaries of her life through her interactions with her mother Dolores, her grandmother Mama Lupita, her cousin Mara, and a wide cast of townspeople. As Denise Chávez brings this population to life, their actions and motivations are shown as reflections of social attitudes about race, ethnicity, gender, and class. It is difficult for them to break through these attitudes to wholeness and acceptance of

amines the treatment of motherhood in “The Last of the Menu Girls” and works by other Chicanas. Ikas, Karin Rosa, ed. Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002. Lorna Dee Cervantes, Denise Chávez, Lucha Corpi, and Mary Helen Ponce are among the ten Chicana writers who describe their lives and work. Keating, Ana Louise. “Towards a New Politics of Representation? Absence and Desire in Denise Chávez’s ‘The Last of the Menu Girls.’” In We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Politics, edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue. Tuscaloosa: University of Ala198

Denise Chávez others. Soveida, for example, seems destined to repeat the same mistakes other women in her family made in their choice of partners, and she becomes involved with a number of lazy and hurtful men, including her two husbands. Soveida eventually writes a handbook for waitresses, called “The Book of Service,” based on her thirty years of work at El Farol. The advice she gives about service reflects her ideas about her life and her connections with other people, and it shows her growing sense of pride in herself as a Chicana. She has learned to question and reject the limited roles assigned to Mexican American women in a male-dominated society, and instead she develops a philosophy that encompasses individual strength and endurance combined with a genuine respect for others, as shown through service. Soveida’s philosophy is reinforced by the novel’s unrestrained, irreverent, and hilarious scenes, by the effective use of colloquial bilingual speech, and by the indepth exploration of such universal issues as poverty, personal relationships, illness, and death. Chávez’s characters are all individuals with distinctive voices, and she draws them together in ways that show the possibilities of changing social prejudices. — Lois A. Marchino

bama Press, 2002. Analyzes the narrative structure, treatment of Mexican American identity, and multiculturalism in Chávez’s collection of stories. Kelly, Margot. “A Minor Revolution: Chicano/a Composite Novels and the Limits of Genre.” In Ethnicity and the American Short Story, edited by Julie Brown. New York: Garland, 1997. Compares “coming of age” tales in several works by Chicana writers, including Chávez’s The Last of the Menu Girls. Madsen, Deborah L. Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Critiques the work of six contemporary Mexican American poets, including Chávez. 199

Sandra Cisneros Mexican American novelist, poet, and short-story writer Born: Chicago, Illinois; December 20, 1954 long fiction: The House on Mango Street, 1984; Caramelo, 2002. short fiction: Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories, 1991. poetry: Bad Boys, 1980; The Rodrigo Poems, 1985; My Wicked, Wicked Ways, 1987; Loose Woman, 1994. children’s literature: Hairs = Pelitos, 1984. miscellaneous: Vintage Cisneros, 2004.

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andra Cisneros (SAHN-drah sihz-NAY-rohs) was born in Chicago in 1954 to a Mexican father and a Mexican American mother. She grew up in a working-class family with six brothers; her family expected her to follow the traditional female role. Her lonely childhood growing up with six males and the family’s constant moving contributed to her becoming a writer. The family moved frequently—from house to house and from Chicago to Mexico City—which caused constant upheavals. She felt trapped between the American and the Mexican cultures, not belonging in either one. Understandably, Cisneros withdrew into a world of books. The family finally settled down in a Puerto Rican neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. This setting provided Cisneros with the inspiration for her first novel, The House on Mango Street, and the characters who appear in it. Cisneros attended Loyola University in Chicago and graduated in 1976 with a B.A. in English. She was the only Hispanic majoring in English at the time, a unique situation which isolated her from her peers. During her junior year at Loyola, she came in contact with her cultural roots and the Chicago poetry scene, influences to which she would later return in her writings. 200

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Cisneros moved to Iowa, where she earned a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1978. During her two years there, she felt lonely and displaced. A particularly unsettling experience occurred, one that ultimately helped her find her narrative voice and her writing subjects. During a seminar discussion of Gaston Bachelard’s

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The Poetics of Space (1957), Cisneros discovered that his use of “house” as a metaphor differed radically from her understanding. She realized that Bachelard and her classmates shared a communal understanding of “house,” one that she did not possess. Recognizing her otherness, she decided to write about subjects and memories close to her life but foreign to her classmates: third-floor flats, fear of rats, drunk and abusive husbands, all unpoetic subjects. At the same time, she found her literary voice, one which had been there but she had suppressed. Before developing her career as a writer, Cisneros worked as a teacher, counselor, and arts administrator. She also began writing autobiographical sketches about her life experiences and continues to write about “those ghosts that haunt [her], that will not [let] her sleep.” She is internationally recognized for her poetry and fiction in which she intermingles English and Spanish. Her poetry and short stories, though not copious, have earned for her recognition as an outstanding writer. Bad Boys, Cisneros’s first published work, appeared in 1980. The series of seven poems depicts childhood scenes and experiences in the Mexican American ghetto of Chicago. In these early poems, Cisneros was more concerned with sound and timing than with content. Although Cisneros has written four volumes of poetry, it is her fiction for which she is best known. The House on Mango Street received the 1985 Before Columbus American Book Award. This work, which took her five years to complete, provides a feminine perspective on growing up. The collection of fortyfour narratives relates the experiences of Esperanza Cordero, the Hispanic adolescent narrator. The sketches describe her experiences as she matures and discovers life in a poor Hispanic urban ghetto. The house on Mango Street symbolizes her search for identity as she yearns for “a house all [her] own.” My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Cisneros’s third volume of poetry, which includes “The Rodrigo Poems,” is her revised and expanded master’s thesis. It collects sixty poems on various subjects, including encounters with friends, travels, amorous experiences such as the monologues by women romantically involved with Rodrigo, and the guilt associated with a Mexican 202

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I remember . . . the taste of a caramelo called Glorias on my tongue. At La Caleta beach, a girl with skin like cajeta, like goat-milk candy. The caramelo color of your skin after rising out of the Acapulco foam. . . . for me these things, that song, that time, that place, are all bound together in a country I am homesick for, that doesn’t exist anymore. That never existed. A country I invented. Like all emigrants caught between here and there. —from “Pilon,” in Caramelo

and Catholic upbringing. Supported by a 1982 National Endowment for the Arts grant, Cisneros traveled through Europe and worked on poems describing brief encounters with men she met during her travels. The poems in this collection tell Cisneros’s own life story from a more mature voice. As the title suggests, the major emphasis is on the author’s dealing with her own sexuality and feelings of guilt associated with her “wicked” ways. Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories appeared in 1991. Its twenty-two narratives or cuentitos focus on Mexican American characters who live near San Antonio, Texas. Cisneros surveys the Mexican American woman’s condition, which is at once individual and universal. She addresses contemporary issues associated with stereotypical roles, minority status, and cultural conflicts. Loose Woman consists of sixty love poems that verge on the erotic and cover a broad spectrum of emotions. The poems are organized into three sections: “Little Clown, My Heart,” “The Heart Rounds up the Usual Suspects,” and “Heart, My Lovely Hobo.” In these poems, Cisneros breaks loose from feelings of guilt and celebrates her womanhood. Caramelo marked Cisneros’s return to long fiction, with a more conventional novelistic form than her previous works. 203

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The House on Mango Street Cisneros won the 1985 Before Columbus American Book Award for The House on Mango Street (1984), in which she tells a coming-of-age story about an adolescent Chicana in a poor Chicago neighborhood in the midtwentieth century. Cisneros’s first book of fiction received immediate acclaim, becoming a widely studied text in schools and universities. The novella consists of sketches, each exploring some aspect of the experiences of the narrator, Esperanza Cordero, after her family moves into a house of their own. These sketches are drawn from Cisneros’s own life; her family moved into a Puerto Rican neighborhood on Chicago’s north side during her twelfth year. Cisneros discovered this voice and subject in resistance against the pressure to conform to what she felt was, at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a “terrible East-coast pretentiousness.” She realized that growing up Chicana in Chicago set her apart from most other writers. Esperanza’s story also is one of resistance, especially against the expectations for women in her culture. She and her family

The dominant metaphor for this multigenerational story is the rebozo, or traditional Mexican shawl, owned by the main character’s grandmother. As in all of Cisneros’s fiction, there is a strongly autobiographical aspect to her heroine, Celaya, who travels between her nuclear family home in Chicago and the extended family home in Mexico City, and who grows up to become a poet. — Gloria A. Duarte-Valverde Learn More Bloom, Harold, ed. Sandra Cisneros’s “The House on Mango Street.” Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. One in a series of books 204

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have dreamed of having an even grander home, but she discovers strongly ambivalent feelings about home once they have one. On one hand, it is a place to be and to become. On the other, it is a sort of prison, especially for women. In “The Family of Little Feet,” Esperanza and two girlfriends get high-heeled shoes and wander playfully into the neighborhood, imagining themselves adults. At first, when men notice them and women seem jealous, they enjoy the attention, but when a drunk demands a kiss from Esperanza in exchange for a dollar, she and her friends flee and get rid of the shoes. Every other specifically feminine artifact and feature becomes a potential trap: hips, cooking, dresses, physical beauty, and most of all houses. Repeatedly, wives and daughters are locked in houses, where they serve men. Finally, Esperanza dreams of a house of her own, one that is not her husband’s or her father’s but hers. At the end of the novella, Esperanza begins the story again, revealing that her book has become her house on Mango Street, the home in her heart that her best female mentors have told her to find. By writing, she gets hold of it, and in this way she can have a home and still resist becoming a man’s property. — Terry Heller

designed for students of literature. Contains essays about the novel, a list of characters, a summary and analysis of the book, a biographical sketch of Cisneros, and a description of how the book was written. Brady, Mary Pat. “The Contrapuntal Geographies of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.” American Literature 71 (March, 1999): 117-150. Shows how Cisneros’s narrative techniques challenge various spatial representations and lay bare hidden stories. Claims that Cisneros explores the various subtleties of violence of changing spatial relations. Cisneros, Sandra. “The Authorized Sandra Cisneros Web Site.” http://www.sandracisneros.com. Accessed March 22, 2005. 205

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In addition to information about her books, this Web site contains a biography, interviews, reviews, scheduled appearances, study guides, and other resources. Cruz, Felicia J. “On the ‘Simplicity’ of Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street.” Modern Fiction Studies 47, no. 4 (2001): 910-946. Studies the varieties of representation in Cisneros’s novel. Doyle, Jacqueline. “More Room of Her Own: Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street.” MELUS 19 (Winter, 1994): 5-35. Discusses The House on Mango Street as a transformation of the terms of Virginia Woolf’s vision in A Room of One’s Own (1929). Asserts Cisneros’s work provides a rich reconsideration of the contemporary feminist inheritance as influenced by Woolf. Griffin, Susan E. “Resistance and Reinvention in Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek.” In Ethnicity and the American Short Story, edited by Julie Brown. New York: Garland, 1997. Discusses the role that Mexican popular culture and traditional Mexican narratives play in limiting women’s sense of identity. Focuses primarily on the negative effects of popular romances in Mexico and televised soap operas. Madsen, Deborah L. Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. A close study of the work of Bernice Zamora, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Denise Chávez, Alma Luz Villanueva, and Lorna Dee Cervantes. Includes an extensive bibliography. Miriam-Goldberg, Caryn. Sandra Cisneros: Latina Writer and Activist. Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Enslow, 1998. A biography in a series on Hispanic writers. Mullen, Harryette. “‘A Silence Between Us Like a Language’: The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek.” MELUS 21 (Summer, 1996): 3-20. Argues that Spanish as a code comprehensible to an inside group and as a repressed language subordinate to English are central issues in Woman Hollering Creek. Olivares, Julian. “Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, and the Poetics of Space.” The Americas Review 15, nos. 3/4 (1987): 160-170. In-depth analysis of the sketches with spe206

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cial attention to Cisneros’s distinctive use of the metaphor of a house situated in a Latino neighborhood. Bibliographical references. Sanborn, Geoffrey. “Keeping Her Distance: Cisneros, Dickinson, and the Politics of Private Enjoyment.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 116, no. 5 (2001): 1334-1348. Analyzes Cisneros’s use of a poem by Emily Dickinson in The House on Mango Street as a means of evoking the pleasures of withdrawal from face-to-face sociality. Thompson, Jeff. “‘What Is Called Heaven?’ Identity in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek.” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Summer, 1994): 415-424. States that the overall theme of the stories is the vulnerability of the female narrators. The vignettes should be read as symptomatic of a social structure that allows little cultural movement and little possibility for the creation of an identity outside the barrio. Wyatt, Jean. “On Not Being La Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Never Marry a Mexican’ and ‘Woman Hollering Creek.’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14 (Fall, 1995): 243-271. Discusses how the stories describe the difficulties of living on the border between Anglo-American and Mexican cultures and how the female protagonists of the stories struggle with sexuality and motherhood as icons that limit their identity.

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Jesús Colón Puerto Rican journalist and short-story writer Born: Cayey, Puerto Rico; January 20, 1901 Died: New York, New York; 1974 nonfiction: A Puerto Rican in New York, and Other Sketches, 1961; The Way It Was, and Other Writings, 1993; “Lo que el pueblo me dice—”: Crónicas de la colonía puertorriqueña en Nueva York, 2001.

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esús Colón (heh-ZEWS koh-LOHN) was involved as an activist with the Puerto Rican and Latino communities in New York City. He understood the plight of the poor, working-class immigrant, since he had held a variety of odd jobs, from dishwasher to dockworker. A committed socialist, Colón wrote from New York for a socialist newspaper, Justicia, published in Spanish in Puerto Rico. He also contributed articles in English to the New York-based socialist newspapers The Daily Worker and The Worker. His publications denounced violations against the working class, and they opposed biased attitudes against the Puerto Rican, the Latino, and the African American populations. His 1961 anthology gathers together some of those articles, some of them published for the first time in English. Colón’s background as a newspaper reporter directly influenced his sketches. Born to a humble peasant family, Colón aims to offer a kinder view of the Puerto Rican experience by recapturing key moments of his own life and stressing particular folk traditions as representative of Puerto Rican culture. His struggle to succeed in New York City, where he arrived at sixteen, illustrates the saga of the Puerto Ricans generally, who since the 1920’s have come to that city by the thousands. Colón protests the generally negative attitude toward Puerto Ricans, and instead offers his own life as an example of the Puerto Rican experience in New York, a life that is a combination of strong, fulfilling, and discouraging emotions.

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A Puerto Rican in New York The success of A Puerto Rican in New York has cemented Jesús Colón’s place as a founding member of the Nuyorican movement and as a spokesperson for Puerto Rican culture. In the book, Colón tacitly acknowledges the conflict inherent within the Puerto Rican immigrant community as it struggles to strike a balance among its Puerto Rican heritage, life in New York City, and the larger influence of North American popular culture. Throughout the sketches, the author’s political loyalties are readily apparent—Colón was a lifelong socialist— and in his famous description of listening to El lector (the reader) narrate the works of Victor Hugo and Miguel de Cervantes to a factory of cigar workers, the reader gets a clear view of what life was like for the Puerto Rican and Cuban cigar workers in the Caribbean and in New York City. Though Colón avoids over-romanticizing life in Puerto Rico, he does not shy away from frank treatment of the political, social, and economic discrimination faced by thousands of Puerto Rican (and other Caribbean) immigrants in the United States. These workers, Colón points out, were often highly skilled tradespeople and artisans whose valuable skills were ignored in their new country. The discrimination that Colón and his contemporaries faced helped strengthen his belief—clearly visible in the sketches in A Puerto Rican in New York—in the value of retaining his Puerto Rican identity and of not assimilating into the United States mainstream. Later writers, like Piri Thomas and Nicholasa Mohr, have been heavily influenced by Colón’s theories and writing style. — Anna A. Moore

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I was seventeen. This poem to me then seemed to summarize the wisdom of all the sages that ever lived in one poetical nutshell. It was what I was looking for, something to guide myself by, a way of life, a compendium of the wise, the true and the beautiful. All I had to do was to live according to the counsel of the poem and follow its instructions and I would be a perfect man—the useful, the good, the true human being. —from “Kipling and I”

Colón’s sketches place the writer as protagonist in stories that attempt to illustrate specific traits of the Puerto Rican personality. His narrative is highly dependent upon his memories, which go back to his childhood in rural Puerto Rico during the first decade of the twentieth century. Displaying his ability to remember incidents from several decades before, Colón recalls the readers who entertained tobacco wrappers, some of whom were so well read that they could recite long literary passages from memory. Listening to men reading and commenting on literature made Colón aware of social injustice toward the working class. Colón’s stories bring together a number of colorful characters who inhabit the Puerto Rican barrios of New York. His book, with its commitment to document the Puerto Rican immigrant experience, stands out as a rich sociological treatise. Colón’s major contribution may be his ability to validate the role of average Puerto Rican immigrants as protagonists of their own stories. For Colón, the history of the Puerto Rican community is not to be found in the “sentimental, transient and ephemeral, or bizarre and grotesque in Puerto Rican life” but in “the deep traditions of striving for freedom and progress that pervade our daily life.” — Rafael Ocasio 210

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Learn More Balestra, Alejandra. “Alberto O’Farrill y Jesús Colón: Dos Cronistas en Nueva York.” In Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage. Vol. 4. Edited by José F. Aranda, Jr., and Silvio Torres-Saillant. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 2002. Compares the treatment of New York City and Hispanic American identity in the works of the two writers. Despite the title of this work, the essays in this book are written in English. Colón, Jesús. The Way It Was, and Other Writings: Historical Vignettes About the New York Puerto Rican Community. Edited with an introduction by Edna Acosta-Belen and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1993. Colón relates anecdotes about his experiences in New York. The introductory essay, “The World of Jesús Colón,” examines his life and work within the context of his New York experiences. The book also contains a chronology of significant dates in Colón’s life and a bibliography of his work. Herrera-Sobek, Maria, and Virginia Sánchez Korrol, eds. Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage. Vol. 3. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 2000. The third volume in this fourvolume collection of essays about Hispanic literature contains two essays about Colón’s work, one written by Tim Libretti and the other by Ernest K. Padilla.

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Lucha Corpi Mexican American novelist and poet Born: Jáltipan, Veracruz, Mexico; April 13, 1945 long fiction: Delia’s Song, 1989; Eulogy for a Brown Angel, 1992; Cactus Blood, 1995; Black Widow’s Wardrobe, 1999. poetry: Palabras de mediodía/Noon Words, 1980; Variaciones sobre una tempestad/Variations on a Storm, 1990. children’s/young adult literature: Where Fireflies Dance, 1997. edited text: Máscaras, 1997.

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ucha Corpi (LEW-chah KOR-pee), called Luz, was born and socialized in Mexico. At an early age, she began to give recitals and read poems in public, encouraged by her teachers. Her youthful adventures with her brother included visiting the ruined house of the revolutionary fighter Juan Sebastián. Afterward, the siblings listened to music from the jukebox at the neighborhood cantina but were caught by their mother. Later, as an adult, Corpi sang and told stories to her own son. Corpi emigrated at nineteen, in 1965, to San Francisco with her husband. Their son was born there. Five years later they divorced. It is notable that Corpi did not write until living in the Chicano community after the divorce. Mexican literary traditions are stronger than Anglo ones in her work, which employs the codes and conventions of the Hispanic lyrical and romantic tradition, echoing the works of Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez, and Federico García Lorca. Corpi’s work presupposes knowledge of Mexican popular expressions and legends such as that of La Llorona, the ghost woman who seeks her children. Because of the author’s emigration and divorce, Corpi’s work explores the boundaries between Anglo and Mexican cultures and life in a society that permits women to express themselves in writing. She writes her fiction in English and her poetry in Spanish (and collaborates with her longtime translator, 212

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Catherine Nieto-Rodríguez, on the bilingual versions). Corpi addresses border issues and three cultures (the indigenous Mexican, the mixed modern Mexican, and the Anglo) as she writes about four areas of human experience: the natural world, the cultural overlay, the pagan aspect, and artistic expression. Among her most potent symbols are the bridge (emigration) and the Virgin of Guadalupe (the long-suffering woman). Critics note that while Corpi’s works presuppose an audience of women, she avoids overt textual markers of sex, keeps her literary voice impersonal, and concerns herself with the representation of female consciousness. Corpi examines her own emotions and those of her characters by using images rather than words. In Corpi’s mind, women’s tragedies are caused by men’s insensitivity to women, and she means to sensitize male literary tradition to women’s issues. Corpi holds a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.A. in comparative literature from San Francisco State University. She began to teach English as a second language in Oakland, California, in 1973. She has served as coordinator of the Chicano Studies Library at the University of California at Berkeley, as president of the Centro Chicano de Escritores, and as a member of the feminist mystery novel circle Sisters in Crime.

Tired of bearing in my eyes light, wall and silence and in my ears a rustle of wings and rain, between farewell and unexpected door I chose fire and in its promise of rich harvest my heart burned one winter night. —from “Fugue”

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Delia’s Song Delia’s Song (1989) recounts a young woman’s maturation amid the turmoil of the late 1960’s. The novel begins with a flashback that suggests the intensity of Delia’s emotional state before switching to the central event, which took place earlier in the novel’s chronology. The novel’s three sections outline the pain and excitement of this turbulent period through Delia’s emergence from naïveté into a new maturity. The novel’s events are strongly autobiographical, echoing a Mexican American woman’s quest for literary respect, sexual identity and equality, an academic degree, and a fulfilling love. One of the most effective social themes of Delia’s Song is the disturbing reality of sexism as it is experienced in Chicano culture. Delia must struggle against her own family’s limiting attitudes as well as those of her colleagues. Her two brothers, both dead (one shot as a soldier in Vietnam, the other killed by a drug overdose), receive the affections of their mother that Delia desires and deserves. The deepest expression of her struggle for sexual and intellectual identity takes place within, as she moves from an idealistic girl to a fully developed artist, academic, and partner in love. Dreams, sprinkles of family history, and memories all interrupt the plot. Stream-of-consciousness flashbacks, vignettes of dream imagery, bits of journal entries, family oral histories, and even newspaper clippings are used as narrative elements. The story is presented from the limited-omniscent point of view, filtered principally through the emotions and mind of Delia, but taking liberties by revealing the thoughts of other characters as well. This structure reflects one of the main themes: that life happens all at once, at the level of consciousness, and has meaning to the degree that people have awareness of it. — Joyce Ann Hancock

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Her Eulogy for a Brown Angel won a PEN/Josephine Miles Award and a Multicultural Exchange Award for best book of fiction. The bilingual children’s book Where Fireflies Dance was named to the 2000-2001 Texas Bluebonnet Award master list of the Texas Library Association. In addition, she received the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation Writers Award in 1995 for outstanding Chicana literature, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Latino Hallmark Book Award. — Debra D. Andrist Learn More Armstrong, Jeanne. Demythologizing the Romance of Conquest. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Analyses Delia’s Song and novels by three other women that deal with colonized peoples. Ikas, Karin Rosa, ed. Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002. Lorna Dee Cervantes, Denise Chávez, Lucha Corpi, and Mary Helen Ponce are among the ten Chicana writers who describe their lives and work. Ordóñez, Elizabeth. “Sexual Politics and the Theme of Sexuality in Chicana Poetry.” In Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols, edited by Beth Miller. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Includes an analysis of Corpi’s poetry. Sánchez, Marta Ester. “Prohibition and Sexuality in Lucha Corpi’s Palabras de mediodía/Noon Words.” In Contemporary Chicana Poetry: A Critical Approach to an Emerging Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Focuses on the work of Corpi and three other Chicanas.

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Julio Cortázar French-Argentine novelist, short-story writer, poet, and translator Born: Brussels, Belgium; August 26, 1914 Died: Paris, France; February 12, 1984 Also known as: Julio Denís (pseudonym) long fiction: Los premios, 1960 (The Winners, 1965); Rayuela, 1963 (Hopscotch, 1966); 62: Modelo para armar, 1968 (62: A Model Kit, 1972); Libro de Manuel, 1973 (A Manual for Manuel, 1978). short fiction: Bestiario, 1951; Final del juego, 1956; Las armas secretas, 1959; Historias de cronopios y de famas, 1962 (Cronopios and Famas, 1969); End of the Game, and Other Stories, 1963 (also as Blow-Up, and Other Stories, 1967); Todos los fuegos el fuego, 1966 (All Fires the Fire, and Other Stories, 1973); Octaedro, 1974 (included in A Change of Light, and Other Stories, 1980); Alguien que anda por ahí y otros relatos, 1977 (included in A Change of Light, and Other Stories, 1980); Un tal Lucas, 1979 (A Certain Lucas, 1984); Queremos tanto a Glenda y otros relatos, 1980 (We Love Glenda So Much, and Other Stories, 1983); Deshoras, 1982. poetry: Presencia, 1938 (as Julio Denís); Los reyes, 1949; Pameos y meopas, 1971; Salvo el crepúsculo, 1984. nonfiction: Buenos Aires Buenos Aires, 1968 (English translation, 1968); Último round, 1969; Viaje alrededor de una mesa, 1970; Prosa del observatorio, 1972 (with Antonio Galvez); Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales: Una utopía realizable, 1975; Literatura en la revolución y revolución en la literatura, 1970 (with Mario Vargas Llosa and Oscar Collazos); Paris: The Essence of Image, 1981; Los autonautas de la cosmopista, 1983; Nicaragua tan violentamente dulce, 1983 (Nicaraguan Sketches, 1989). translations: Robinson Crusoe, 1945 (of Daniel Defoe’s novel); El inmoralista, 1947 (of André Gide’s L’Immoraliste); El hombre 216

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que sabía demasiado, c. 1948-1951 (of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Knew Too Much); Vida y Cartas de John Keats, c. 19481951 (of Lord Houghton’s Life and Letters of John Keats); Filosofía de la risa y del llanto, 1950 (of Alfred Stern’s Philosophie du rire et des pleurs); La filosofía de Sartre y el psicoanálisis existentialista, 1951 (of Stern’s Sartre, His Philosophy and Psychoanalysis). miscellaneous: La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos, 1967 (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, 1986); Último round, 1969; Divertimiento, 1986; El examen, 1986.

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ulio Cortázar (HEW-lee-oh kohr-TAH-sahr), unquestionably one of the pivotal figures in Latin American literature, is a master of the short story, and his novel Hopscotch is widely considered to be one of the first great Spanish American novels. Born in Belgium to Julio José and María Descotte de Cortázar, Cortázar learned French along with his native Spanish, and his French-Argentine duality underlies all his work. His father abandoned the family soon after they returned to Argentina in 1920, and Julio was brought up by his mother and aunt. After earning degrees in primary and secondary education, with a concentration in literature, he first taught high school in several small towns and in Mendoza. He then taught French literature at the University of Cuyo, but his agitation against the Peronist regime led to his arrest and his subsequent forced resignation from the university. During his teaching years he wrote steadily

We had barely come to know each other when life began to plot everything necessary for us to stop meeting little by little. Since you didn’t know how to fake I realized at once that in order to see you as I wanted to I would have to begin by shutting my eyes. . . . —from Hopscotch (trans. Gregory Rabassa)

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but, dissatisfied with the quality of his work, refused to publish anything other than the collection of poems Presencia (presence), which appeared in 1938 under the pseudonym Julio Denís, and the long philosophic-dramatic poem Los reyes (the kings), which appeared in 1949 under his own name, as did a few magazine stories. It was fellow author Jorge Luis Borges, with whose work Cortázar’s has often been compared, who published his compatriot’s first story, “House Taken Over,” in the journal Los anales de Buenos Aires. Oppressed by the political and literary atmosphere of his native land, Cortázar took advantage of a scholarship from the French government to study in Paris. He left Argentina in 1951 to settle permanently in Paris, where he earned his living working as a freelance translator and for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In 1953 Cortázar married the Argentinian Aurora Bernardez, who was also a freelance translator. The year 1951 marked the official start of Cortázar’s literary career with the publication of Bestiario (bestiary), his first collection of short stories. Bestiario contains Cortázar’s trademark signature, the gradual intrusion of a mysterious subversive element into the lives of ordinary people. Rarely is this force seen as an instrument of good, or at least liberating change; rather, it serves as an obsessive harbinger of destruction and death. (Julio Cortázar is the Spanish translator of the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe.) Cortázar’s next volume of short stories, End of the Game, and Other Stories, contains some of his best prose. Stories such as “Axolotl” and “The Night Face Up” have become classics of the genre, and “Devil’s Drool” introduced Cortázar to an international audience through Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 cinematic version Blow-Up (although the film bears little relation to the story). By 1960 Cortázar had become widely known as a craftsman of intricate, beautifully written short stories that often had cunning, sleight-of-hand endings. The publication in that year of The Winners marked a drastic change in his artistic vision, however, for here the purely aesthetic gives way to metaphysical preoccupations. Variously interpreted as allegory, social satire, or thinly camouflaged political criticism, The Winners recounts 219

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the ill-fated voyage of a group of passengers who have received tickets for a mysterious cruise as a state lottery prize. Hopscotch is regarded by most critics as Cortázar’s masterpiece. An immediate success in Argentina, it soon gained international acclaim, helped by the prize-winning English translation by Gregory Rabassa. Hopscotch demands active reader participation. According to the “Table of Instructions” at the beginning, there are at least two ways to read the novel, and the reader has to choose which path to follow through the book—a path that is never-ending, since the last two chapters refer endlessly to earlier ones. The main narrative of Hopscotch deals with the Argentinian Horacio Oliveira’s endeavor to shatter the mundane world of supposed reality and rationality and find the secret harmony underlying all things. Artistically, by means of its disjoined structure, the originality of its language, its black humor, often aimed directly inward, and, above all, its selfconscious awareness of itself as artistic creation, Hopscotch represents a manifesto against all closed literary structures and credos. After Hopscotch Cortázar continued his literary experimentation. 62: A Model Kit is a demonstration of the literary theories of the writer Morelli in the concluding paragraphs of Hopscotch. There is no basic structure and no unifying sense of time, space, character, or plot. The reader must piece together the disparate components of the work to create a whole. Much of Cortázar’s later work can best be called “collage.” A Manual for Manuel combines fiction and history, the thriller with factual statistics and articles concerning political torture and oppression. Cortázar had often been criticized for his seeming indifference to the social and political realities of his native land, but toward the end of his life his writing began to include overt political statements. He donated the royalties of A Manual for Manuel to the families of political prisoners and became a supporter of the Cuban and Nicaraguan governments. Nicaragua awarded him the Rubén Darío Order of Cultural Independence. Cortázar’s last collagelike work, A Certain Lucas, describes an expatriate Argentine writer living in Paris struggling humorously with the effects of time and a growing illness. Cortázar, 220

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Hopscotch Hopscotch (1963) is famous for its highly innovative structure, outlined in the “Table of Instructions,” where Cortázar says that “this book consists of many books, but two books above all.” The first can be read in normal numerical order from chapter 1 to chapter 56; the reader may then ignore the rest of the book “with a clear conscience.” The other book is more collaborative; the reader becomes the author’s accomplice in the creative act, reading the book in the hopscotch manner to which the title alludes. In this second book, the reading begins at chapter 73, following a sequence of chapters indicated by the author at the end of each chapter. Upon reaching the final chapter, the collaborative reader is directed to return to chapter 58 (the next to last), which in turn directs the reader back to chapter 131, the final one. Thus there is no definitive ending, but an endless movement back and forth between the last two chapters. Horacio Oliveira, an Argentinian intellectual living in Paris around 1950, is involved in a search for authenticity. About forty years old, he spends his time in prolonged self-analysis and introspection. With a group of bohemian friends calling themselves the Serpent Club, he drinks, listens to jazz, and discusses philosophy, music, literature, art, and politics. Obsessed with the unconventional, Oliveira, during one of many drunken binges, strives to gain some sort of mystical vision via sexual intercourse with a destitute streetwalker. Discovered by the police, he is deported to Argentina, where he encounters old friends and continues his search, working first in a circus and then in an insane asylum. Despite the novel’s inconclusive end, some suggest that Oliveira commits suicide, while others see a positive ending. Like the children’s game of hopscotch, the novel has many possibilities, depending ultimately upon the reader-player for its specific form and outcome. — Genaro J. Pérez

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himself gravely ill with leukemia, spent much of his last months in and out of hospitals. Cortázar died of a heart attack on February 12, 1984, in Paris. Cortázar was gifted with a sense of whimsy, and he used humor to awaken the reader from passivity and reveal opportunities of wider significance. He once said, “I’ve always thought that humor is one of the most serious things there is.” His humor, along with all of his innovative techniques and linguistic fireworks, is enlisted in aid of one cause, the shattering of all artificial, conventional barriers that hinder the search for selfrealization. Cortázar’s characters are expatriates, exiled not only physically from their native land but from their inner selves as well. Along with Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, Cortázar’s importance as a major figure in the emergence of Latin American literature is not debated. His originality, inventiveness, and daring use of language have been recognized and acclaimed. Cortázar countered the charge that he had “abandoned” his native country by insisting that it was time for Latin Americans to see themselves as citizens of the world and stop making cultural isolation a virtue. The political content of his later work and his interest in social concerns also helped to silence these critics. — Charlene E. Suscavage Learn More Alonso, Carlos J., ed. Julio Cortázar: New Readings. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Part of the Cambridge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature series. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Bloom, Harold, ed. Julio Cortázar. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. One in a series of books aimed at students of literature. Includes essays about “Axolotl,” Los reyes, and other works, a biography, a list of works by and about Cortázar, and an introductory essay by Bloom. Boldy, Steven. The Novels of Julio Cortázar. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1980. The introduction provides a helpful biographical sketch linked to the major developments in Cortázar’s writing. Boldy concentrates on four 222

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Cortázar novels: The Winners, Hopscotch, 62: A Model Kit, and A Manual for Manuel. Includes notes, bibliography, and index. Peavler, Terry J. Julio Cortázar. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Peavler divides Cortázar’s short fiction into four categories—the fantastic, the mysterious, the psychological, and the realistic—in order to show how Cortázar used these genres as games to study discourse. Includes a chronology and a through bibliography. Schmidt-Cruz, Cynthia. Mothers, Lovers and Others: The Short Stories of Julio Cortázar. Albany: University Press of New York, 2004. Schmidt-Cruz analyzes the concept of feminism in Cortázar’s work. She argues his obsession with his mother is the source of his unease with femininity. Stavans, Ilan. Julio Cortázar: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1996. See especially the chapters on the influence of Jorge Luis Borges on Cortázar’s fiction, his use of the fantastic, and his reliance on popular culture. Stavans also has a section on Cortázar’s role as writer and his interpretation of developments in Latin American literature. Includes chronology and bibliography. Standish, Peter. Understanding Julio Cortázar. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. A reassessment of Cortázar’s work, including the work published after his death. Includes a brief overview of his life. Yovanovich, Gordana. Julio Cortázar’s Character Mosaic: Reading the Longer Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Three chapters focus on Cortázar’s four major novels and his fluctuating presentations of character as narrators, symbols, and other figures of language. Includes notes and bibliography.

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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Mexican poet Born: San Miguel Nepantla, Mexico; November, 1648 (baptized December 2, 1648) Died: Mexico City, Mexico; April 17, 1695 Also known as: Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana poetry: Inundación castálida, 1689; Segundo volumen de las obras, 1692 (the long poem Primero sueño is translated as First Dream, 1983); Fama y obras póstumas, 1700; The Sonnets of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz in English Verse, 2001. drama: Amor es más laberinto, wr. 1668, pr. 1689 (with Juan de Guevara); El divino Narciso, pr. c. 1680, pb. 1690 (The Divine Narcissus, 1945); Los empeños de una casa, pr. c. 1680, pb. 1692 (adaptation of Lope de Vega Carpio’s play La discreta enamorada; A Household Plagued by Love, 1942); El mártir del Sacramento, San Hermenegildo, pr. c. 1692, pb. 1692; El cetro de José, pb. 1692; The Three Secular Plays of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, pb. 2000. nonfiction: Respuesta de la poetisa a la muy ilustre Sor Filotea de la Cruz, 1700.

Enough of suffering, my love, enough: let jealousy’s vile tyranny be banned, let no suspicious thought your calm corrupt with foolish gloom by futile doubt enhanced, for now, this afternoon, you saw and touched my heart, dissolved and liquid in your hands. —from “Sonnet 164” (trans. Margaret Sayers Peden) 224

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miscellaneous: Obras completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 19511957 (4 volumes: I, Lírica personal, poetry; II, Villancicos y letras sacras, poetry; III, Autos y loas, drama; IV, Comedias sainetes y prosa, drama and prose; Méndez Plancarte, editor); A Sor Juana Anthology, 1988.

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or (Sister) Juana Inés de la Cruz (HWAH-nah ee-NAYZ deh lah KREWS), born Juana Inés Ramírez de Asbaje, was a child prodigy who learned to read at the age of three and during her life had an insatiable thirst for knowledge. She learned Latin for access to its literature. She discovered early her poetic 225


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“First Dream” Sor Juana was able to manipulate the often unwieldy and intricate language of the Spanish Baroque, with its rich heritage from the Golden Age, into expressions of delicate, feminine vision and sensibility. Her aesthetic documentation of the search for knowledge, love, and God is the most complete personal and artistic record of any figure from the colonial period. Her love poetry appears to reflect frustrating and painful experiences prior to her entry into the convent, focusing on themes of ambivalence and disillusionment. Sor Juana’s philosophical poems are linked to her amatory verse by her sense of disenchantment, with the exception of “First Dream,” (1692) in which she delights in depicting the joys and dangers of her intellectual explorations. “First Dream,” which is among the best philosophic poems in Spanish, begins with a description of nightfall, in which the entire physical world eventually succumbs to sleep. The human spirit, freed from the constraint of the body, soars upward to find a perspective from which it can comprehend the immensity of the universe. Once it glimpses the overpowering dimensions of creation, the soul retreats to the shadows. Finding a mental shore on the sea of knowledge, it decides to approach the challenge of learning by dividing things into categories and mastering each division separately. In spite of doubts that the mind can really know anything, the soul continues its search for truth. Dawn arrives, however, and the dream ends inconclusively. Once considered to be on the fringe of literature because of its deliberate Gongorism (artifice and obscurantism), “First Dream” is enjoying the positive reconsideration accorded the entire Spanish Baroque. Accepting the style of this poem as not only valid but also essential to its meaning, one can better appreciate Sor Juana’s most mature and complex statement about the human condition. — William L. Felker

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ability and wrote both humorous and serious verse while serving as lady-in-waiting to the Marquesa de Mancera, wife of the viceroy of Mexico. In pursuit of an intellectual life, she first joined the Barefoot Carmelites, but when their rigid discipline proved too strict, she entered the convent of San Jerónimo in 1669. Her cell, with her enormous private library of four thousand volumes, became a gathering place for the intellectuals of Mexico. Because of the charm and intellectual brilliance of her writing, she was called México’s “Tenth Muse.” In poetry, she imitated the Spaniards Luis de Góngora y Argote (1561-1627) and Francisco Gómez de Quevado y Villegas (1580-1645), who strongly influenced her age. She wrote in a variety of styles, including sixty-five sonnets, the poetic form most popular in the Baroque period in which she lived. About a third of them deal with love, perhaps from her own experience in courtly society. She also wrote First Dream, a long philosophical poem that stands apart from all other Baroque poetry. Though greatest as a lyric poet, she also wrote, alone and in collaboration, several plays in imitation of Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681) and Lope de Vega Carpio (1562-1635), Spain’s Golden Age playwrights. Her religious plays and lyrics reflect the language and culture of the native people. Details of her early life are given in her autobiographical essay Respuesta de la poetisa a la muy ilustre Sor Filotea de la Cruz (reply to Sister Philotea of the cross). Ecclesiastical superiors reproved her worldly interests and suggested concentrating on religious matters. Though in her reply she defended women’s rights to intellectual freedom, she did take their advice and sold her library and musical instruments for the benefit of the poor. Several years later, serving as nurse during a plague, she became one of its victims. — Ludmila Kapschutschenko-Schmitt Learn More Flynn, Gerard. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. New York: Twayne, 1971. A concise work of criticism that serves to introduce the reader to Sor Juana. One chapter emphasizes her biography, 227


the other chapters her poetry and theater. Presents Sor Juana as a woman of strong philosophical bent who wrote some of the best lyrical and dramatic poetry of colonial Latin America. Gonzalez, Michella A. Sor Juana: Beauty and Justice in the Americas. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2003. Biography examining Sor Juana’s life, work, and theology. The author argues that by joining aesthetics with the quest for truth and justice, Sor Juana was a forerunner of the contemporary liberation theology movement. Kirk, Pamela. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Religion, Art and Feminism. New York: Continuum, 1998. Kirk portrays Sor Juana as a major theological figure, well aware of her role as a woman artist in a patriarchal world. Luciani, Frederick. Literary Self-Fashioning in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Presses, 2004. Examines how Sor Juana created a literary image of her self through her writing and places her work within the arc of her career. Merrim, Stephanie. Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999. Situates the work of Sor Juana within the field of seventeenth century women’s writing in Spanish, English, and French. The protofeminist writings of Sor Juana are used as a benchmark for the examination of the literary production of her female contemporaries. Includes bibliographical references and index. _______, ed. Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. A collection of essays by important literary critics and translators of Sor Juana. Discusses her life, time, and work in the context of feminist criticism. Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana: Or, The Traps of Faith. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988. A definitive work on Sor Juana. Dense and scholarly study of the age in which she lived and consideration of her life and works. A blend of history, biography, and literary criticism. Pedén, Margaret Sayers, trans. A Woman of Genius: The Intellectual Autobiography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Salisbury, Conn.: Lime Rock Press, 1982. One of the premier translators from Spanish renders Sor Juana’s memoirs in English. 228

Victor Hernández Cruz Puerto Rican, African American, American Indian poet Born: Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico; February 6, 1949 poetry: Papo Got His Gun! and Other Poems, 1966; Snaps, 1969; Mainland, 1973; Tropicalization, 1976; By Lingual Wholes, 1982; Rhythm, Content & Flavor, 1989; Red Beans, 1991; Panoramas, 1997; Maraca: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2000, 2001. nonfiction: Doing Poetry, 1970. edited texts: Stuff: A Collection of Poems, Visions and Imaginative Happenings from Young Writers in Schools—Opened and Closed, 1970 (with Herbert Kohl); Paper Dance: Fifty-five Latino Poets, 1995 (with Virgil Suárez and Leroy V. Quintana).

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ictor Hernández Cruz (VEE-tohr hehr-NAHN-dehs krewz) moved with his family to Lower East Side Manhattan from a small town in Puerto Rico when he was five years old. His par-

Forget about history textbooks; poems are the best way to study and teach history. Poems are testaments of the actual experience of living through a personal and public event; they are the closest thing to the truth. Historical writing is what might have happened, what people have said over and over again, or what historians have written, being reflected upon by others ad infinitum. The voice of an epoch is in the words of its poets. Poetry is synonymous with exile in Latin America. —from Panoramas

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ents soon divorced. In an autobiographical essay, “The Bolero of the Red Translation,” in Red Beans, he begins, “Migration is the story of my body, it is the condition of this age.” He describes his move from a tropical world “in a bowl surrounded by green mountains wherein a million mysteries resided” to a world of “awesome gray velocity” where people spoke a “language which sounded like bla-bla-bla.” He identifies himself with Spanish and English, and with native (Taino Indian) and African (notably Yoruba) cultures. “Poetry falls everywhere,” Cruz writes. “It is the most available art form.” He was writing poems by the time he was fourteen, but he dropped out of high school in 1967, just six months before graduation. By then, he had already produced his first collection, a mimeographed book entitled Papo Got His Gun! and Other Poems, which he distributed to local bookstores and sold for seventy-five cents a copy. It was discovered by an editor of the Evergreen Review, who reprinted several of the poems. The book, which Cruz elsewhere describes as “the poetry of youthful fire,” concerns teenagers coming to grips with the reality of life and death in the barrio of Spanish Harlem. After leaving high school, Cruz became involved with the East Harlem Gut Theater, a collective effort of Puerto Rican artists and actors, and he helped edit the literary magazine Umbra between 1967 and 1969. By 1968, his poems had appeared in such noted magazines as Ramparts and Black Fire, an anthology edited by African American poet LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). In 1968, in the midst of the protests against the war in Vietnam, he moved to Berkeley, where he met such influential writers as Octavio Paz, Ishmael Reed, Allen Ginsberg, and Ernesto Cardenal. He was not yet twenty when Random House published Snaps, which brought him national recognition. The title refers to his use of spontaneous, abrupt “snapshot imagery” in the poems. He taught briefly at an experimental school in Berkeley and divided his time between the East and West Coasts. In Mainland, which has been described as “a poetic odyssey through the United States that eventually leads back to the source, the mother of his music and poetry: Borinquen” (the Indian term for Puerto Rico), Cruz sustains his commitment, as 230


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“Listening to the Music of Arsenio Rodriguez Is Moving Closer to Knowledge” The central feature of “Listening to the Music of Arsenio Rodriguez Is Moving Closer to Knowledge,” is its lightheartedness and sense of whimsy. Rodriguez was a blind percussionist, player of the tres (a small nine-stringed guitar), composer, and bandleader. His impact on the mambo style in Cuba in the 1930’s was immeasurable, and he was responsible for the mambo craze that took the northeastern United States by storm in the early 1950’s. The poem salutes Afro-Cuban music and the great musician in its title. At the same time, it ridicules those “researchers” who would attempt to study the results of its impact. The stuff of knowledge is in the music; to study its aftereffects—the “puddles of water” that the listeners have become—is inane. The poem’s vivid irony lies in the comparison of the researchers’ scrutiny of the pools of water with the knowledge gained from directly experiencing the music. The poem satirizes the academicians’ preoccupation with the puddles; they are unaware of the water’s essence and intangible qualities. The neighbors, represented by Doña Flores, love the music and willingly liquefy under its spell. Flores means flowers, and, as Mrs. Flores is affected, so are the flowers in stanza four that “dance/—in the wind.” The poem’s organic spontaneity creates a bridge in stanza three between Flores and flowers: the people, who are lively and beautiful, and the metaphorical essence and spirit of the people. The water is warm because it is metaphorically equated with those who are alive and, in their exultation, transformed. The poem ends with the researchers seeking answers to their absurd questions. They have missed the beauty and truth of the music of Arsenio Rodriguez. — Ron Welburn

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one critic phrases it, to “the power of poetry and music to strengthen people and bring about social change.” He married in 1975; he and his wife had a son and a daughter but later divorced. In 1975, Cruz also began a stint as editor of Revista Chicano-Riqueña. In 1976 appeared Tropicalization, a collection of poems and prose, which has been described as an effort to “tropicalize” the United States with Latin American sensibility and energy. Bilingual diction is common in this book, which has been noted for showing more wit and humor, more innovation, and greater vitality than his previous work. It reflects on his return visits to Puerto Rico, which helped him to “recharge” his Spanish. Cruz likens its impact to a “greenhouse effect” on the “Northern latitudes.” Of this book, he says, “I took the English syntax to the point of destruction.” Cruz has described By Lingual Wholes as “an attempt to write a language that was neither Spanish nor English” (what some commentators refer to as “Spanglish”). Throughout his work, Cruz has interrogated, challenged, and disturbed the Anglo order of things, often by infusing the rhythms of Latin song and dance in his poems. One critic notes a “pulsating” salsa beat in Tropicalization but a slower and more melodic bolero rhythm in By Lingual Wholes. Rhythm, Content & Flavor, published in 1989, brought together selected poems from four earlier books (beginning with Snaps) and added twenty new poems in a section entitled “Islandis: The Age of Seashells,” which concerns a prominent theme in his work: Puerto Rico as the source of music and wisdom. Red Beans was acclaimed by some critics as his best book. Nature imagery and metaphor that, like his humor, draw on the surreal are more prominent than ever in this collection of thirtysix poems and thirteen short essays in prose. In “The Bolero of the Red Translation,” he offers definitions of poetry and comments on his role as a bilingual poet. The poems and prose record his debt to such varied influences as William Carlos Williams (whose mother was Puerto Rican) and salsa music. The poems and essays of Panoramas celebrate the Caribbean, with its blend of Taino, African, and Spanish cultures. The 2001 collection Maraca includes previously unpublished poems from four 232


decades, beginning in the mid-1960’s. It was named a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Victor Hernández Cruz is a poet of the folk, a voice some associate with pop culture, a performance poet, and a poet of community. Significantly, he works on the borders of two languages, Germanic English and Latin Spanish. — Ron McFarland Learn More Aparicio, Frances R. “‘Salsa,’ ‘Maracas,’ and ‘Baile’: Latin Popular Music in the Poetry of Victor Hernández Cruz.” MELUS 16 (Spring, 1989/1990): 43-58. Explores and delineates the sound, beat, and rhythm of popular Latin American music in Cruz’s poetry, and describes how this music tropicalizes American culture and gives a sense of cohesion and identity to immigrants. Aparicio notes that, when read aloud, the work sounds like jazz poetry. Binder, Wolfgang. “Our Puerto Rican Territories in the North; or Poetry as Cultural Infiltration: The Case of Victor Hernández Cruz’s Tropicalization of New York.” In Crossing Broders: Inner- and Intercultural Exchanges in a Multicultural Society, edited by Heinz Ickstadt. Berlin, Germany: Peter Lang, 1997. A German scholar analyzes the treatment of the Puerto Rican experience and cultural differences in Tropicalization. Brenner, Marie J. K. “Victor Hernández Cruz.” In Critical Survey of Poetry, edited by Philip K. Jason. 2d rev. ed. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2003. A thorough overview of the poet’s life and career. Cruz, Victor Hernández. Interview by Bill Moyers. In The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets. New York: Doubleday, 1995. In an interview with the poet, Moyers examines the blend of cultures that have influenced Cruz’s poetry; also outlines the poet’s rural roots and his absorption of bolero and salsa musical rhythms. Kanellos, Nicolás. Victor Hernández Cruz and La Salsa de Dios. Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979. Focuses on the essentially Puerto Rican side of Cruz’s poetry with special emphasis on the African-Caribbean strains of salsa, whose or233


igins Cruz locates in Africa and the pre-Columbian West Indies. Torrens, James. “U.S. Latino Writers: The Searchers.” America 167 (July 18-25, 1992). Takes a sociological and psychological approach, noting that Cruz writes of numbing poverty and of the immigrant’s struggle for dignity; he also explores the immigrant writer’s need to belong to a group.

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Euclides da Cunha Brazilian novelist Born: Santa Rita do Rio Negro, Brazil; January 20, 1866 Died: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; August 15, 1909 Also known as: Euclides Rodrigues Pimenta da Cunha long fiction: Os sertões, 1902 (Rebellion in the Backlands, 1944). nonfiction: Contrastes e confrontos, 1907; À margem da história, 1909; Canudos (Diário de uma expediçao), 1939 (autobiography).

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uclides da Cunha (yew-KLEE-dehz dah KEWN-yuh) is considered one of the greatest Brazilian writers and one of the outstanding stylists in the Portuguese language. Born in 1866 in the municipality of Cantagalo, Cunha lost his mother when he was barely three years old and spent a considerable part of his early life with relatives in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia. His formative years are marked by three major influences, which were to leave a lasting imprint on his life and career. From his father, a poet and lover of books, young Cunha learned to appreciate literature in general and poetry in particular. At Colégio Aquino in Rio de Janeiro, where he completed his secondary education, he was introduced to the abolitionist, republican, and positivist ideas that constitute the essence of his thought. Finally, at the Polytechnic School and at the War College, he received a solid scientific training. An act of insubordination against the imperial minister of war, motivated by his strong republican beliefs, led to Cunha’s dismissal from the War College in 1888, but he was reinstated after the proclamation of the republic one year later and was able to graduate with a degree in mathematics and sciences in 1891. After serving as a military field engineer for five years, Cunha resigned from the army to pursue careers as a public works engineer in São Paulo and as a journalist for O Estado de São Paulo. It 235

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Rebellion in the Backlands Rebellion in the Backlands (1902) is based on an uprising led by a charismatic religious fanatic against the federal government of Brazil. The novel has been called Brazil’s national epic and anticipated the “nonfiction novel” of later decades. Cunha begins with two essays on the land and the people of the region. He draws a daunting picture of the hot, rugged, semidesert sertão and speculates that the personality of its inhabitants, the sertanejos, was formed by the harsh environment and by their mixed racial heritage: white, black, and Indian. The introductory essays set the stage for the narrative: Cultural differences first cause religious friction between the established Catholic Church and the sertanejo Antonio Conselheiro, the Counselor, who preaches against the new taxes and new laws of the recently established Brazilian Republic (1889). The Counselor’s idea of proper government is a vague theocracy, ruled by the law of God rather than civil law. The Counselor and his followers withdraw to distant, inaccessible Canudos, where they establish their theocracy and military stronghold

was as a correspondent for this newspaper that Cunha had the experience that formed the basis for his masterpiece, Rebellion in the Backlands. In 1897, he traveled to the backlands of Bahia to cover the suppression by the army of a yearlong uprising in the village of Canudos led by Antônio Conselheiro, a charismatic mystic whose apocalyptic message of a better and more just time attracted thousands of the dispossessed poor to the area. Although religious fanaticism has always been a relatively common response to the impoverished conditions in the Brazilian northeast, the rebellion at Canudos stirred a national hysteria because it was perceived as a threat to the young republic. Re236

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consisting of the religiously devout but also hordes of bandits, who raid the surrounding countryside. The government leaves Canudos alone until October, 1896, when a dispute precipitates the military phase of the rebellion. The Bahian governor dispatches one hundred troops, but they are routed by Counselor’s jagunços. A second and third expedition follow, meeting with similar outcomes: At one point, the jagunços line the roadsides with soldiers’ heads and hang the decapitated corpse of a commander from a bush to blow in the wind. Stunned by the defeat, the Republic calls for full mobilization of its military resources in a fourth expedition, which nearly fails until the war minister sends in reinforcements that eventually surround Canudos. The jagunços continue to resist, fighting to the last man, but fall back into a mass grave that had been dug earlier. In Rebellion in the Backlands Cunha ultimately condemns his country for using military power against its own citizens, poor people living in a neglected region that might be termed the Appalachia of Brazil. Cunha believed that it would have been better to integrate the sertanejos into the national culture through education, not military force. How civilized, asks Cunha, is a culture which must prevail through superior brutality? — Harold Branam

fusing to pay taxes and calling the government of the republic “the law of the hound,” the rebels were in turn accused of plotting the return of the monarchy. An ardent republican, Cunha at first supported the government’s efforts to crush the rebellion, but as he witnessed the backlanders’ heroic resistance, he developed a growing sympathy for them. In Rebellion in the Backlands, Cunha denounces the events at Canudos as a national crime caused by a complete lack of understanding of the reality in the backlands and the rebels’ true motives. Despite Cunha’s initial difficulty in finding a publisher, the book became an overwhelming success and led to the author’s election 237

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to the Brazilian Historical and Geographic Institute and to the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1903. Cunha spent the last seven years of his life in a variety of public posts, including those of surveyor of frontiers and professor of philosophy. In 1907, he published Contrastes e confrontos (contrasts and comparisons), a collection of essays dealing with historical, political, and ethnological topics. Appointed to the chair of logic at Colégio Pedro II, a distinguished public institution in Rio de Janeiro, Cunha delivered his inaugural lecture on July 21, 1909, less than a month before he was murdered by the lover of his estranged wife. His second collection of essays, À margem da história (on the margin of history), was published posthumously in late 1909. Rebellion in the Backlands is unquestionably Cunha’s most important and original work. The first two parts—“The Land,” a geographic treatise on the region, and “Man,” a study of the ethnic origins of the backlanders, the psychology of Conselheiro, and the social organization of the village—give Cunha the opportunity to display his solid grounding in a variety of fields, including geology, botany, and ethnology. The third part, “The Battle,” an account of the bloody conflict viewed as determined by the ecological, ethnic, and biological conditions described in the first two parts, is the culmination of the book. Written in a fast-paced narrative style, it has the rhythm and scope of a great work of fic-

Rich in splendid mines, this region is cursed by its own opulence. Spurred on by the dream of dazzling wealth, restless adventurers were in the habit of seeking it out, a couple of hundred years ago, and, with their painstaking search of its mountainsides and riverheads, did more than merely devastate the land with the waste tracts (catas) left by their mining operations, their picks and dredges. . . . —from Rebellion in the Backlands (trans. Samuel Putnam) 238

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tion. Thus, despite attesting Cunha’s vast scientific knowledge, Rebellion in the Backlands is first and foremost the work of a literary master, one who does not hesitate to go beyond the strict confines of science to convey a personal vision. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the paradoxical depiction of the backlander. Although Cunha subscribed to the deterministic scientific theories of the time, according to which the population of the backlands was doomed to extinction by the weakening effects of miscegenation and harsh climate, he portrays the backlanders as brave survivors perfectly fitted to their harsh environment. By means of an original interweaving of scientific vocabulary with figurative language and myth, Cunha elevates the backlanders to a heroic status and turns the conflict at Canudos into a battle of epic proportions. Rebellion in the Backlands belongs to a long tradition of literary works dealing with the issue of national identity, one which dates to the Romantic period, when, in their effort to establish a separate identity from the Portuguese colonizers, Brazilians developed a mythical view of themselves as the harmonious synthesis of the white, black, and indigenous races that constituted their nationality. Cunha calls this myth into question by proposing an interpretation of Brazil that underscores the country’s unresolvable differences. Rebellion in the Backlands has been influential both inside and outside Brazil. Although it did not inaugurate a literary treatment of the backlands, it definitively changed the representation of that region by stressing its harsh conditions of life and by turning it into a symbol of the “other” Brazil. Cunha’s approach inspired a number of Brazilian writers, particularly in the 1930’s, as well as many of the Brazilian filmmakers who created the New Cinema movement in the 1960’s. Cunha’s masterpiece has also been the source of important works outside Brazil, including R. B. Cunninghame Graham’s A Brazilian Mystic: The Life and Miracles of Antonio Conselheiro (1920), a study of the career of the Canudos leader, and Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa’s acclaimed novel La guerra del fin del mundo (1981; The War of the End of the World, 1984). — Luiz Fernando Valente 239

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Learn More Codebo, Marco. “The Vision of the Outsider in Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões, Mario Vargas Llosa’s La guerra del fin del mundo, and José J. Veiga’s A casca da serpente.” In The Image of the Outsider in Literature, Media, and Society, edited by Will Wright and Steven Kaplan. Pueblo, Colo.: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, University of Southern Colorado, 2002. Describes Cunha’s treatment of the outsider in Rebellion in the Backlands. Foster, David William, and Virginia Ramos Foster, eds. Modern Latin American Literature. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975. Contains a useful selection of critical assessments of Cunha’s work, some of which have been translated from the Portuguese by the editors. Frank, Waldo. South American Journey. London: Victor Gollancz, 1943. Devotes about ten pages to Cunha and calls Rebellion in the Backlands “Brazil’s greatest book.” Goldberg, Isaac. Brazilian Literature. 1922. Reprint. New York: Gordon Press, 1975. Has an informative chapter on Cunha, which is one of the earliest studies of Cunha’s work in English. Maligo, Pedro. Land of Metaphorical Desires: The Representation of Amazonia in Brazilian Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. This study of how the Amazon River region is depicted in Brazilian literature includes a chapter entitled “Euclides da Cunha and the Re-invention of Myth.” Putnam, Samuel. “Brazil’s Greatest Book: A Translator’s Introduction.” In Rebellion in the Backlands, by Euclides da Cunha. Translated by Putnam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944. An excellent introduction to Cunha in English.

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Nicholas Dante Puerto Rican playwright Born: New York, New York; November 22, 1941 Died: New York, New York; May 21, 1991 Also known as: Conrad Morales drama: A Chorus Line, pr. 1975 (with James Kirkwood; music by Marvin Hamlisch, lyrics by Edward Kleban).

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icholas Dante (NIH-koh-las DAHN-tay), born Conrado Morales, was coauthor of A Chorus Line, the longest running show in Broadway history. A Chorus Line, which documented the personal and professional struggles of Broadway dancers, was performed at the Shubert Theater 6,137 times between 1975 and 1990. Dante began his career as a dancer and hoped that his work on A Chorus Line would serve as a catalyst to a new career as a writer: “It’s the first thing I ever wrote. . . . I’ve been dancing all my life. Now I hope I can be a writer.” Although Dante planned to major in journalism, he dropped out of Cardinal Hayes High School at the age of fourteen because of negative reactions to his homosexuality. When he was a boy, writing in the genre of fantasy served as an outlet for his emotions, but after dropping out of school he stopped writing because he believed that a writer had to have an education. He supported himself by working as a drag queen and began study-

Two years before his death, Nicholas Dante described his new sense of well-being as the work of his life and said of his major success, A Chorus Line, “I did something really spectacular. . . . I’m going into history if I never write anything again.”

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A Chorus Line Nicholas Dante, Michael Bennett, and James Kirkwood wrote A Chorus Line in 1975. The play is largely based on several hours of tape from a meeting of twentytwo dancers in New York City in January 1974, in which the group shared their stories and their reasons for dancing. The result is a musical based heavily on real-life experiences in the cutthroat world of dance; in fact, the character Paul is closely based on Dante’s experiences as a struggling actor and homosexual in New York City. The production was met with immediate critical acclaim, and quickly moved to Broadway, where it played for many years and won a Pulitzer Prize. The plot is relatively simple. A director, Zach (based on Bennett), auditions a series of dancers, narrowing the field based on ability to sing, dance, and explain the importance of their art. As the pool gets smaller, the audience becomes more intimately acquainted with each individual and with the themes that carry through many of the dancers’ lives: broken families, ambition, and the sacrifice of personal relationships in pursuit of a career on stage. Perhaps as a result, those few dancers chosen form their own sort of family. They have no guarantee that the show will last longer than its opening night, but the group finds hope under the stage’s lights and joy in the audience’s applause. — Anna A. Moore

ing dance. In 1965, he worked summer stock in St. Louis. The experience in summer stock encouraged him to write again; he believed he could write better material. Dante wrote two unproduced musicals: “The Orphanage” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” In 1968, he performed in his first Broadway show, I’m Soloman, and continued working as a dancer in the choruses of several Broadway musicals. 242

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Dante’s work on A Chorus Line began in 1974 during two twelve-hour taping sessions of dancers recounting their life stories. During these sessions, Dante told his life story, which would become the monologue of Paul, the longest monologue in the show. Dante told how he had hidden both his homosexuality and his profession from his parents; they only knew that he worked in theater. When his parents arrived backstage at the Jewel Box Revue for a surprise visit, they found him dressed as a showgirl. Dante felt relieved when his father told the producer, “Take care of my son.” Although Dante had begun work on A Chorus Line using material from the taped sessions, the script was not completed until after the show was cast and in rehearsal. After the second rehearsal, James Kirkwood, a seasoned writer, was brought in to work with Dante, and the show began taking shape. Kirkwood had written Dante’s favorite book, Good Times/Bad Times (1968), and the two had an amiable working relationship. However, because the writing of the show was a collaboration, Dante felt that he did not get the credit he deserved for his writing, especially from the dancers whose stories were woven into the script. Although he worked on the show for eight months before Kirkwood joined the collaborative team, Kirkwood’s name appeared first in the credits. Furthermore, Dante argued that the idea that the show be in the form of a montage was his own, rather than that of Michael Bennett (the show’s producer), who received credit. Nevertheless, Dante received the Pulitzer Prize for A Chorus Line, as well as the Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Dante was unable to repeat the success of A Chorus Line. He wrote the book to an unsuccessful musical, Jolson Tonight, which toured the United States in the early 1980’s. He also wrote an unproduced screenplay, “Fake Lady,” which explores the character Paul San Marco from A Chorus Line. Dante had trouble dealing with the pressure of repeating such a phenomenal early success, and he received no help from Bennett on further writing projects. Kirkwood and others on the creative team had made more money than he had, and Dante’s financial advisers had managed his money poorly. 243

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Before Dante died of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in 1991, he had found peace with himself. He attributed his newfound sense of wholeness to participation in an unorthodox therapy using mind-expanding drugs and caring for his senile mother, Maria Guadalupe Morales, who had moved in with him following the death of his father, Conrado Morales. He thought that the therapy allowed him to come to terms with his childhood problems, and taking care of his mother, who did not even know what day it was, allowed him to understand the insignificance of whether or not he was famous. After years of drifting, he became motivated to write again and believed he could find success again. When he died, he was working on a new play titled A Suite Letting Go, about a man caring for his elderly senile mother. — Nettie Farris

Learn More Mandelbaum, Ken. “A Chorus Line” and the Musicals of Michael Bennett. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Contains direct quotations from Nicholas Dante on his background before writing A Chorus Line and details the working relationship between Dante and his cowriter James Kirkwood. Includes an index. “Nicholas Dante.” Variety, May 27, 1991, 57. An obituary, with a concise overview of Dante’s life and career. Sanchez, Alberto Sandoval. “A Chorus Line: Not Such a ‘One Singular Sensation’ for Puerto Rican Crossovers.” Ollantay 1, no. 1 (January, 1993): 46-60. Cultural study analyzes Puerto Rican representation in A Chorus Line through two of its characters (Diana and Paul) and also through writer Nicholas Dante. Discusses Dante’s fade into obscurity. Viagas, Robert, Baayork Lee, and Thommie Walsh. On the Line: The Creation of “A Chorus Line.” New York: William Morrow, 1990. Contains statements from the original cast of A Chorus Line regarding Dante’s contribution to the musical’s book. Discusses the Jewel Box monologue, which was explicitly based on Dante’s life. Includes an index. 244

Rubén Darío Nicaraguan poet Born: Metapa, Nicaragua; January 18, 1867 Died: León, Nicaragua; February 6, 1916 Also known as: Félix Rubén García Sarmiento short fiction: Cuentos completos de Rubén Darío, 1950 (Ernesto Mejía Sánchez, editor). poetry: Abrojos, 1887; Rimas, 1887; Azul, 1888; Prosas profanas, 1896 (Prosas Profanas, and Other Poems, 1922); Cantos de vida y esperanza, los cisnes, y otros poemas, 1905; Canto a la Argentina, oda a mitre, y otros poemas, 1914; Selected Poems of Rubén Darío, 1965 (Lysander Kemp, translator). nonfiction: La caravana pasa, 1903; Tierras solares, 1904; Historias de mis libros, 1914. miscellaneous: Obras desconocidas de Rubén Darío, 1934 (Raúl Silva Castro, editor); Escritos inéditos de Rubén Darío, 1938 (Erwin K. Mapes, editor); Rubén Darío, Obras completas, 19501953 (5 volumes).

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ubén Darío (rew-BAYN dah-REE-oh), the patriarch of Spanish-American Modernistic poetry, was born in a Nicaraguan village and started to write poetry when he was a boy. He published his first verses at the age of fourteen, using the euphonic pseudonym of Rubén Darío, by which he came to be known. Darío’s parents were not much concerned with their son; an uncle reared the boy and gave him the opportunity for the limited formal education he received at the Institute of León, Nicaragua. In 1881 Darío traveled to El Salvador, and in 1886 he traveled to Chile. There he discovered the French Parnassian movement, which sought to express formal and descriptive splendor in the poem; his books of this period, Abrojos and Rimas, were, however, still influenced by the neoclassicism and 245

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the Romanticism that, unlike in Europe, where one supplanted the other, coexisted in Spanish America. The influence of the Parnassians and the Symbolists, both of which movements looked for secret “correspondences” in the world, led Darío to change his style. This was first evident in 1888 in the collection of poetry titled Azul, a book notable more for its prose than for its poetry. This small work established Darío’s position in the Spanish-speaking world because of the eulogistic pages written about it by the Spanish critic Juan Valera in his Cartas americanas (1889). Darío thereupon went to Europe—the first of his many trips to that continent—where in Spain he was acclaimed by other writers of his generation. On his return to Central America he was appointed consul of Colombia in Argentina, but before assuming his duties there he traveled once more

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O Swan! O sacred bird! If once white Helen, immortal princess of Beauty’s realms, emerged all grace from Leda’s sky-blue egg, so now, beneath the white of your wings, the new Poetry, here in a splendor of music and light, conceives the pure, eternal Helen who is the Ideal. —from “The Swan” (trans. Lysander Kemp)

to Europe. With that trip, Paris became his cultural center, for there he met Parnassian as well as Symbolist writers and, influenced by their work, was reconfirmed in his own poetic creed. Upon his return to America, he became the leader of young Argentinean poets in Buenos Aires and founded the periodical Revista de América, an important journal in the development of Spanish-language literature at the end of the nineteenth century. Darío traveled extensively and frequently to Spain, France, the United States, Argentina, Guatemala, and elsewhere. He finally returned to León, where he died of the effects of alcoholism. Three stages are apparent in his work, each represented by one book: Azul; Prosas profanas, and Other Poems; and Cantos de vida y esperanza, los cisnes, y otros poemas. The first shows the seminal traits of modernistic French thought and sentiment, the pantheistic attitude toward nature, the chromatism, and the revival of traditional Spanish verse. In the second Darío arrived at the peak of his art. In spite of the title, the book is composed only of poems, works of exultant vigor and aristocratic elegance. This was a period marked by exotic, cosmopolitan, classical reminiscences, as well as by his ardent embrace of all that life could offer; references to flesh, wine, and a merry life erupt often in his verses. The third book is an autumnal one. In it he avoided the flamboyancy and chromatism of earlier work, which are replaced by a melancholy tone, concern for social problems, and a focus on morality, politics, love, religion, death, and the dangers of Spanish South America being engulfed by North America. — Emil Volek 247

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Cantos de vida y esperanza, los cisnes, y otros poemas This, the last of Darío’s three great collections, was published in 1905, when Darío was thirty-eight and in the depths of ill health and despondency. Widely acclaimed in Europe and South America, it was recognized as a departure for the poet. Though the collection does continue some themes associated with Darío’s early works, it also includes a number of poems featuring traditional Christian imagery as well as several political poems—both uncommon in his previous collections. “A Roosevelt” (“To Roosevelt”), the best-known poem in the collection, is sharply political. It voices a stern warning to the United States to forswear colonial designs on Latin America. The poem is a confident address to President Theodore Roosevelt, a celebrated big-game hunter, whose personification of the United States is clear. “To Roosevelt” followed close on the heels of the Spanish defeat in the Spanish-American War (1898). Voicing a solemn warning to the United States and a disarming affinity with Spain, the poem did much to enhance the reputation of Darío, then living in Europe, as a spokesman of Latin America. The poem boasts of the proud Spanish spirit and the strong literary traditions of Latin America— both ironic choices for Darío—as the sources of South America’s potential resistance to the United States. Darío enjoys a lasting place in Hispanic literature. His art reunited Spain and its former empire after the wars of independence. He infused Latin American literature with the cosmopolitanism of the European avant-garde, while his own achievement drew European critical attention to the literary activity of Latin America. He was, to many, the quintessential American artist: an earnest student of tradition and an eager captive of the future. — David Nerkle

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Learn More Acereda, Alberto, and Rigoberto Guevara. Modernism, Rubén Darío, and the Poetics of Despair. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2004. A detailed study of Darío’s work and its relationship to Modernism. LoDato, Rosemary C. Beyond the Glitter: The Language of Gems in Modernista Writers Rubén Darío, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, and José Asunción Silva. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1999. A critical study of Latin American and Spanish Modernist writers. Includes bibliographical references and an index. McGuirk, Bernard. Latin American Literature: Symptons, Risks, and Strategies of Poststructuralist Criticism. New York: Routledge, 1997. An analysis of Latin American literature from 1890 to 1990, including the work of Darío. McGuirk examines the confrontation between theory, politics, and culture that is present in literature of this period. Solares-Larrave, Francisco. “A Harmony of Whims: Towards a Discourse of Identity in Darío’s ‘Palabras Liminasies.’” Hispanic Review 66, no. 4 (Autumn, 1998): 447-465. An examination of Rubén Darío’s ability to manipulate words to evoke a “soul” and to create beauty. Torres-Rioseco, Arturo. The Epic of Latin American Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964. History and criticism of Latin American literature. Includes commentary on Rubén Darío’s poetry and an index. Watland, Charles. Poet Errant. New York: Philosophical Library, 1965. A biography of Darío with bibliographic references.

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José Donoso Chilean novelist Born: Santiago, Chile; October 5, 1924 Died: Santiago, Chile; December 7, 1996 Also known as: José Donoso Yañez long fiction: Coronación, 1957 (Coronation, 1965); Este domingo, 1965 (This Sunday, 1967); El lugar sin límites, 1966 (Hell Has No Limits, 1972); El obsceno pájaro de la noche, 1970 (The Obscene Bird of Night, 1973); Tres novelitas burguesas, 1973 (novellas; Sacred Families, 1977); Casa de campo, 1978 (A House in the Country, 1984); La misteriosa desaparición de la Marquesita de Loria, 1980; El jardín de al lado, 1981; La desesperanza, 1986 (Curfew, 1988); Taratuta; Naturaleza muerta con cachimba, 1990 (novellas; “Taratuta” and “Still Life with Pipe,” 1993); Donde van a morir los elefantes, 1995; El Mocho, 1997. short fiction: Veraneo y otros cuentos, 1955; Dos cuentos, 1956; El Charlestón, 1960 (Charleston, and Other Stories, 1977); Los mejores cuentos de José Donoso, 1965; Cuentos, 1971; Seis cuentos para ganar, 1985. drama: Sueños de mala muerte, pb. 1985; Este domingo: Versión teatral de la novela homónima, pb. 1990. poetry: Poemas de un novelista, 1981. nonfiction: Historia personal del “boom,” 1972 (The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History, 1977).

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osé Donoso (hoh-SAY doh-NOH-soh), one of Chile’s leading novelists, is an eminent figure within the Latin American renaissance as well as within contemporary fiction in general. He was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1924. His childhood home, a decaying but still elegant mansion, filled with the many servants and relatives of his father’s wealthy and bedridden greataunts, provided him with inspiration for insightful portrayals of the Chilean bourgeoisie and its servants. His father, a physi-

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cian, seems to have been more dedicated to playing cards and horse racing than to the rigors of dealing with the ill. His dramatic household situation allowed the young Donoso to develop a penchant for art and literature, costumes, the servants’ and aunts’ stories, and the spirit of the nineteenth century, elements which can be noted in the narrative richness of his two masterpieces, The Obscene Bird of Night and A House in the Country. The insanity and eccentricity of his maternal grandmother inspired the female protagonist of his first novel, Coronation. His mother’s intrepid nouveau-riche family and her carnivalesque approach to religion (she had a fascination with witchcraft and costumes) influenced Donoso’s grotesque and fantastical descriptions. All three of these novels, along with This Sunday, capture his childhood activities and games, and the latter portrays the charities of his lovable and theatrical mother. Donoso attended English schools, becoming progressively more averse to the collective experience of sports and other group activities. This feeling of being an outsider led him to rebellious pastimes, such as talking to derelicts and living as a shepherd on the pampa of Punta Arenas. An admiration of the charmed circle and a sense of exclusion are important themes of The Obscene Bird of Night and Sacred Families. When he began

It was for this reason, because she hated violence, and had shown again last night that she was incapable of it, that Judit had to run away. Not weapons, not organization, not power, not money: only stones, homemade bombs, a stolen pistol. What did all that mean? Was it violence, a way of giving oneself naïve satisfaction in the face of the powerful imported weapons that decimated the poor, childish Manuel Rodríguez people? —from Curfew (trans. Alfred MacAdam)

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José Donoso.

his studies at the university in Santiago, he realized that he had read more English literature than his teachers, and in 1949 he received a scholarship to attend Princeton University. There he discovered Henry James, one of Donoso’s most important literary influences, particularly in the early works. Donoso’s first serious literary endeavor was the submission two years after his return to Chile of a story, “China” (1954), to what became a much-discussed anthology in Chile. In 1955 Donoso published his first collection of stories, Veraneo y otros cuentos (summer vacation, and other stories), with money and aid from his family and friends. His literary career launched, he quit his job as a teacher in order to write his first novel, which became very popular in Chile. Through travels and literary friendships with Latin American writers such as the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, Donoso 252

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A House in the Country A House in the Country (1978) is significant for its portrayal of problems that transcend Latin America’s geographical and political boundaries: the unholy alliance between oligarchies and foreign interests, militarism and dictatorships, and the exploitation of the lower class and the lack of freedom of speech and of the press. It is an abstract political allegory about the abuse of power based upon bureaucratic structures. Some of its significant subthemes include adolescent rebellion, the conflict between idealism and materialism, the generation gap, psychosexual repression, conformism and hypocrisy, inauthentic values and lifestyles, and radical solitude and the inability to communicate. Set in an imaginary country whose flora and fauna appear to be drawn from all of South America, A House in the Country employs a vague chronology that befits its mythic and ahistorical nature. It portrays a Kafkaesque world where utopia has gone awry via the symbolic narration of a “revolution”: Children who take advantage of their elders’ absence on an extended and unexplained trip take over the estate and set up their own regime, instituting some reforms among the natives but eventually quarreling among themselves and finally being discovered and chastised after a parental display of force. The problem of the relationship among author, text, and reader is a leitmotif in several works by Donoso, well illustrated in A House in the Country. In an encounter between the novelist and a member of the Ventura dynasty, the character criticizes many details of the narrative, as though he were aware of the reality beyond his fictive world. This technique is a hallmark of metafiction; Donoso presents his literary theories, burlesques the expectations of the reader, parodies literary convention, and repeatedly destroys the mimetic illusion in favor of investigating the problems of the novel as genre. — Janet Pérez

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became aware of the exciting developments in the Latin American novel and became one of the members of the famous “boom” generation in the 1960’s. During that period he married María Pilar Serrano, an artist, a fellow Chilean and, coincidentally, a former pupil of Donoso’s own governess from years before. After sojourns in Mexico, Iowa, and Spain, Donoso returned to Chile in 1980, in part to revisit his roots and the spoken language so crucial to his literature. Parallel to an increasing participation in the political fate of Chile under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Donoso wrote another acclaimed novel in 1986, Curfew. It deals with contemporary Chile, political activism and despair, centering on the funeral of Pablo Neruda’s widow. The two novellas in “Taratuta” and “Still Life with Pipe” demonstrate his continued interest in the construction of identity and the process of artistic creation. Although many of his themes remain constant, Donoso’s narratives show a great range of styles. The earlier realistic depiction in Donoso’s work is in contrast with the surrealistic style of Sacred Families, the self-conscious style and nineteenth century narrator of A House in the Country, and the return to realism and a real love story in Curfew. The loving and honest examination of Chile valiantly struggling with a reign of terror under Pinochet makes the latter novel one of the most perceptive and lyrical about contemporary Chile. His juxtaposition of reality and fiction, concern for social circumstances, powerful portrayal of characters’ anguish, and masterful narrative and linguistic structures make Donoso one of the most original and interesting novelists of his time. In 1990 his native country recognized his achievements, awarding Donoso the Chilean Premio National de Literatura. — Marie Murphy and Linda Ledford-Miller Learn More Callan, Richard J. Jung, Alchemy, and José Donoso’s Novel “El obsceno pájaro de la noche.” Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. Discusses themes of imprisonment and disguise in the context of Jungian analytical psychology. 254

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Carbajal, Brent J. The Veracity of Disguise in Selected Works of José Donoso: Illusory Deception. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. Discusses Donoso’s use of masks, both literal and metaphorical, in his works. Friedman, Mary Lusky. The Self in the Narratives of José Donoso. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004. Friedman argues that the perils of establishing a self is the most important theme in Donoso’s work, and examines how his writing explores this theme. González Mandri, Flora. José Donoso’s House of Fiction: A Dramatic Construction of Time and Place. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995. Focuses on Donoso’s incorporation of masks and houses in his fiction, the latter implicating allusions to Henry James. King, Sarah E. The Magical and the Monstrous: Two Faces of the Child-Figure in the Fiction of Julio Cortázar and José Donoso. New York: Garland, 1992. Informative, although the short citations in Spanish are not translated into English. Despite the minor obstacles for the non-Spanish reader, this comparative study of two figures of the Spanish American “boom” is valuable. McMurray, George R. José Donoso. Boston: Twayne, 1979. An excellent introductory study, with chapters on Donoso’s biography, his short stories, The Obscene Bird of Night, and Sacred Families. Includes chronology, detailed notes, and annotated bibliography. Magnarelli, Sharon. Understanding José Donoso. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. See especially chapter 1: “How to Read José Donoso.” Subsequent chapters cover his short stories and major novels. Includes a bibliography.

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Ariel Dorfman Argentine-born Chilean novelist and short-story writer Born: Buenos Aires, Argentina; May 6, 1942 Also known as: Vladimiro Dorfman (given name) long fiction: Moros en la costa, 1973 (Hard Rain, 1990); Viudas, 1981 (Widows, 1983); La última canción de Manuel Sendero, 1982 (The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, 1987); Máscaras, 1988 (Mascara, 1988); Konfidenz, 1994 (English translation, 1995); The Nanny and the Iceberg, 1999; Blake’s Therapy, 2001. short fiction: Cría ojos, 1979 (My House Is on Fire, 1990). drama: Widows, pr. 1988 (adaptation of his novel); Death and the Maiden, pr., pb. 1991; Reader, pb. 1995; Resistance Trilogy, pb. 1998 (includes Widows, Death and the Maiden, and Reader). poetry: Last Waltz in Santiago, and Other Poems of Exile and Disappearance, 1988. nonfiction: Para leer al Pato Donald, 1971 (with Armand Mattelart; How to Read Donald Duck, 1975); The Empire’s Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds, 1983; Some Write to the Future: Essays on Contemporary Latin American Fiction, 1991; Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey, 1998 (memoir).

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nternational exile is the condition that shapes the life and work of Ariel Dorfman (EH-ree-ehl DOHRF-mahn), the writer born Vladimiro Dorfman who survived the political upheavals of the twentieth century. His father, Adolfo Dorfman, was born in 1907 in Odessa to a well-to-do Jewish family who emigrated to Buenos Aires in 1909 to escape creditors. The writer’s mother, Fanny Zelicovich Vaisman, was born in 1909 in Kishinev, where her grandfather had been murdered in the pogrom of 1903. The family emigrated to Argentina when Fanny was three months old.

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Always leftist and rebellious, Adolfo had joined the Communist Party by the early 1930’s, and when his only son was born in 1942, he named him Vladimiro, after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. A year later, a military coup toppled the Argentine government and brought Juan Perón to power. When the military commanders took over the Universidad de la Plata, where Adolfo taught, he resigned after submitting a scathing letter denouncing the Peronistas’ repression and ignorance. Adolfo fled to the United States, and in February, 1945, his wife, daughter, and son joined him in New York. There, the young Vladimiro caught pneumonia and was surrounded in the hospital by English speakers. On his release three weeks later, he refused to speak any language but English. The year 1945 produced another trauma. His mother, depressed by the difficult circumstances of life, was overwhelmed by the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April and broke down completely. His father placed her in an institution and his children in a foster home. The Dorfman family was reunited on her release. Adolfo worked at the United Nations in the Council for Economic Development, but by 1949 Russia had detonated a nuclear bomb, and the Cold War was escalating. By the early 1950’s Senator Joseph McCarthy, head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, called the United Nations and told officials there to “get that troublemaker Dorfman out of here.” Adolfo left immediately to serve the United Nations in Santiago. Eight months later, when Vladimiro finished high school and had changed his hated name to Edward (although not legally), the family of expatriates reunited again in Chile. The young Dorfman attended school in Chile, studying in Spanish while longing for the United States. He attended the University of Chile, taught classes, and fell in love with Anjelica, the woman who would become his wife. Still tormented by his dual identity, Dorfman, along with his wife and the first of his two sons, went to Berkeley, California, in 1968. Disillusioned with the movement protesting the Vietnam War, the family returned to Chile, where Dorfman threw himself into the democratic movement that brought Salvador Allende to power in 1970. He became cultural adviser to the president’s chief of staff 258

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How to Read Donald Duck How to Read Donald Duck (1971), which Dorfman cowrote with Armand Mattelart, is a classic introduction to Marxist critique and a staple in Latin American classrooms. The book presents a scathing indictment of the Walt Disney Company and of its popular children’s cartoons. According to the authors, Disney cartoons and characters subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) promote capitalist agendas, North American imperialism, and the exploitation of people in developing countries. Moreover, the authors claim, these “innocent” cartoons are aimed at young children whose ideas of wrong and right are in the early stages of formation. Real cartoon frames are given as examples: socialist revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara portrayed as dogs, and philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx are depicted as vultures. How to Read Donald Duck was published during the short-lived Chilean presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-1973). Dorfman, who had been studying in Berkeley, California, was already politically active in socialist circles, and returned to Chile to work with Allende’s minister of communications. Dorfman’s unique understanding of both North American and Chilean cultures inform How to Read Donald Duck, and the book remains popular with audiences on both continents. — Anna A. Moore

and wrote a book, How to Read Donald Duck, that suggested the cartoons featuring that character were a tool of imperialist domination. On September 11, 1973, came the defining event of Dorfman’s life. He heard on the radio that a military junta had overtaken Chile, murdering Allende and establishing General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte as head of the government. Dorfman 259

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“In this country everything finally comes out in the open. Their children, their grandchildren, is it true that you did this, you did what they’re accusing you of, and they’ll have to lie. They’ll say it’s slander, it’s a communist conspiracy, some such nonsense, but the truth will be written all over them, and their children, their very own children, will feel sorrow for them, disgust and sorrow. It’s not like putting them in jail, but. . . .” —from Death and the Maiden

would have expected to be summoned to the national palace in case of such an emergency, but for inexplicable reasons, he was not called, which saved his life. Forced into exile for many years, he has divided his time between Santiago and the United States since the restoration of democracy in his homeland in 1990. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and has taught at Duke University since 1985. Dorfman deals with the Pinochet coup in many of his subsequent works, including The Empire’s Old Clothes, Widows, The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, Mascara, and My House Is on Fire. Death and the Maiden, his play that deals with the aftermath of terror and torture, won the Time Out award as best play of the year and the Sir Lawrence Olivier Award as Best Play of the Year in 1991. Director Roman Polanski made the play into a film of the same name, released in the United States in 1994. In addition to his many books, Dorfman is a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Village Voice, and The Nation. — Sheila Golburgh Johnson Learn More “Ariel Dorfman.” In Dictionary of Hispanic Biography. Detroit: Gale, 1996. Biographical essay focuses on Dorfman’s poetry for the desaparecidos (those whom the Chilean government 260

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termed subversive and were taken from their homes by the secret police, never to be heard from again) and includes a list of his works. Dorfman, Ariel. “Ariel Dorfman.” Interview by Danny Postel. The Progressive, December, 1998. This interview with Dorfman discusses the political events that led to his writing Death and the Maiden, among other works. _______. “Ariel Dorfman.” http://www.adorfman.duke.edu/. Accessed March 22, 2005. The author’s Web site contains information about his books, the text of some of his recent articles, scheduled performances of his plays and showings of his films, a multimedia biography, excerpts from his speeches, his current classes, and more. _______. “The Discovery of Life and Language at an Early Age.” In King David’s Harp: Autobiographical Essays by Jewish Latin Writers, edited by Stephen A. Sadow. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Dorfman contributes an essay in this collection of autobiographical essays by fifteen writers who describe their lives, literary works, formative experiences, and relationships to Jewish communities in Latin America and the United States. _______. Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. This is a remarkable autobiography which details the events, both internal and external, that created the writer. McClennen, Sophia A. The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language, and Space in Hispanic Literatures. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2004. McClennen studies Dorfman and two other exiled writers to discover common elements in their work. Schwartz, Marcy. “Resisting Hybridity.” In Voice-overs: Translation and Latin American Literature, edited by Daniel Balderston and Marcy Schwartz. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Schwartz discusses the challenges of translating Dorfman’s work.

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Carlos Drummond de Andrade Brazilian poet Born: Itabira, Brazil; October 31, 1902 Died: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; August 17, 1987 poetry: Alguma poesia, 1930; Brejo das almas, 1934; Sentimento do mundo, 1940; Poesias, 1942; A rosa do povo, 1945; Poesia até agora, 1947; Claro enigma, 1951; Viola de bolso, 1952; Fazendeiro do ar, 1953; Cincoenta poemas escolhidos pelo autor, 1958; Poemas, 1959; Antologia poética, 1962; Lição de coisas, 1962; In the Middle of the Road, 1965; José e outros: Poesia, 1967; Boitempo, 1968; A falta que ama, 1968; Reunião: 10 livros de poesia, 1969; Menino antigo, 1973; As impurezas do branco, 1973; Esquecer para lembrar, 1979; A paixão medida, 1980; The Minus Sign: Selected Poems, 1980; Carmina Drummondiana, 1982 (with Silva Belkior); Nova reunião: 19 livros de poesia, 1983; Corpo, 1984; Sessenta anos de poesia, 1985; Travelling in the Family, 1986; Amar se aprende amanda: Poesia de convívio e de humor, 1987; Poesia errante: Derrames líricos (e outros nem tanto, ou nada), 1988; Seleta em prosa e verso, 1971; O amor natural, 1992; A paixão medida: Poesia, 1993; José: Novos Poemas, 1993; Carlos Drummond de Andrade: Poesia, 1994; Poesia completa: Conforme as disposições do autor, 2002. short fiction: Contos de aprendiz, 1951; 70 historinhas, 1978; Contos plausíveis, 1981; O sorvete e outras histórias, 1993; As palavras que ningúem diz: Crônica, 1997; Histórias para o rei: Conto, 1997. nonfiction: Confissões de Minas, 1944; Passeios na ilha: Divagaçoes sôbre a vida literária e outras matérias, 1952; Fala, amendoeira, 1957; Cadeira de balanco, 1966; Versiprosa: Crônica da vida cotidiana e de algumas miragens, 1967; Caminhos de João Brandão, 1970; A bôlsa e a vida, 1971; O poder ultra jovem, 1972; 262

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Discurso de primavera e algumas sombras, 1977; Os dias lindos, 1977; Setenta historinhas: Antologia, 1978; Boca de luar, 1984; O observador no escritório, 1985; Tempo, vida, poesia: Confissões no rádio, 1986; Moça deitada na grama, 1987; Conversa de livraria 1941 e 1948, 2000; Carlos e Mário: Correspondência completa entre Carlos Drummond de Andrade (inédita) e Mário de Andrade, 2002 (Lélia Coelho Frota, editor); Quando é dia de futebol, 2002. translation: Fome, 1963 (of Knut Hamsun). children’s literature: Historia de dois amores, 1985. edited texts: Rio de Janeiro em prosa e verso, 1965 (with Manuel Bandeira); Minas Gerais, 1967; Uma pedra no meio do caminho: Biographia de um poema, 1967.

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arlos Drummond de Andrade (KAHR-lohs druh-mohnd thay ahn-DRAH-thay) was born in a small town in the interior of Brazil, the ninth son of a rancher with strict traditional values. His rural origins and family life were to be constant sources of inspiration for his poetry. As a rebellious youth, he studied in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of the state, where the family moved in 1920. The young Drummond had already published several items when, in 1922, he became aware of the Modern Art Week in São Paulo, an event that officially launched Modernismo as a program of artistic renovation and nationalist spirit.

I spent my day. I lost myself in it. Among such losses, a single path surely will emerge from me to me, blank monolith, to compensate. The trees here are lost in meditation. Winter is still hot in me who cradled winter tight, and, inside, this uninscribed column of salt begins to thaw in tears. —from “Elegy” (trans. Virginia de Araújo)

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In 1924, two leaders of the movement from São Paulo, Oswald de Andrade and Mário de Andrade (no relation), took Swiss-French poet Blaise Cendrars on a tour of Brazil; Drummond met them in Belo Horizonte. The young poet from Minas corresponded with Mário de Andrade, one of Brazil’s most influential men of culture, until the death of the latter. Still in his home state, Drummond was a cofounder, in 1925, of A revista (the review), a Modernist organ which lasted through three issues. In the same year, Drummond received a degree in pharmacy, a profession that he never practiced. Instead, he began

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to earn his living in journalism. In 1928, Oswald de Andrade’s radical literary journal Revista de antropofagia (review of anthropophagy) published a neoteric poem by Drummond which generated much controversy and some early notoriety for the author. His first two books of verse were published in 1930 and in 1934, the year Drummond moved to Rio de Janeiro, the political and cultural capital of the nation. In Rio, the writer from Minas served as chief of staff for the minister of health and education and collaborated on magazines and literary reviews. By 1942, he had been contracted by a major publishing house which would regularly publish cumulative editions of the poet’s work, affording renewed exposure to poetry that had originally appeared in limited first editions of narrow circulation. Drummond lost his position in the ministry when the government fell in 1945. For a brief period, he was part of the editorial board of the tribune of the Communist Party. Later in that same year, he found work with the directorship of the National Artistic and Historical Patrimony, a bureaucratic position he held until his retirement in 1962. During his years of public service, Drummond kept up a prolific pace as a journalist, narrator, and poet of diverse talents. In 1954, he obtained a permanent column in a major Rio daily to publish his crónicas; he maintained this activity until the early 1980’s. Throughout these four decades, the author periodically joined the best of his journalistic prose pieces with other original writings for publication in volumes. Parallel to these endeavors, to which a significant part of his wide-ranging recognition and popularity can be attributed, Drummond’s reputation as poet steadily grew. His work has been translated into Spanish, German, French, Swedish, Bulgarian, Czech, Russian, and English. Appealing to connoisseurs of literature and the broader public alike, he became one of Brazil’s most beloved modern writers. With a vast poetic repertory of considerable thematic and stylistic variety, Drummond is widely regarded as the leading Brazilian poet of the twentieth century; many consider him to be the most important lyrical voice in that nation’s entire literary history. He rightly stands alongside the great Portuguese265


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“Residue” and “Search for Poetry” In the midst of widespread social and historical commotion, Drummond wrote two of his most enduring poems. The first, “Resíduo” (“Residue”), is an instigating inventory of emotive and objective presences: Of everything, a little stayed. Of my fear. Of your temper. Of stammered screams. Of the rose, a little.

The second, “Search for Poetry,” voices an ideal poetics. Here the speaker of the poems advises against making poetry of events, feelings, memories, or thoughts. Instead, he says, one must “penetrate quietly the kingdom of words” and contemplate the “thousands of secret faces under the neutral face” of each word. This advice might seem to point out inner contradictions, for much of Drummond’s poetry itself derives from the sources he seems to reject. Without discounting a touch of ironic self-commentary, a less literal reading would not hold occurrences, sentiment, recollection, and ideas to be, in themselves, ill-advised for poets. Indeed, unmediated experience will not yield poetry; the true search is for a linguistic craft capable of reformulating experience into viable art. — Charles A. Perrone

language poets, the classic Luís de Camões and the modern Fernando Pessoa, as well as the major contemporary Latin American poets Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and Octavio Paz. Brazilian Modernismo of the 1920’s and 1930’s sought to free poetry from the lingering constraints of Parnassian and Symbolist verse. Iconoclast writers combated conservative tradition, infusing poetry with New World awareness and revitalizing lyric 266


through application of avant-garde techniques. Perhaps more than any other poet of Modernismo, Drummond was capable of crystallizing the aims of the movement to institute newness and give value to the national variety of the Portuguese language, while forging an intensely personal style with universal scope. Drummond received numerous literary prizes in Brazil for individual works and overall contribution, including those of the PEN Club of Brazil and the Union of Brazilian Writers. He was twice nominated (in 1972 and 1978) for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature awarded by World Literature Today. In his modest way, Drummond refused many other prizes and declined to seek a chair in the Brazilian Academy of Letters. His work has had a tremendous and continuing impact on successive generations of Brazilian artists, influencing emerging lyric poets since the 1930’s. On another front, more than seventy musical settings of his poems have been made. Composers inspired by Drummond include the renowned Heitor VillaLobos (who set Drummond’s poems to music as early as 1926) and the popular vocalist Milton Nascimento. Academic studies of Drummond’s work abound; hundreds of articles and dozens of book-length analyses of his poetry have appeared in Brazil. — Charles A. Perrone Learn More Armstrong, Piers. Third World Literary Fortunes: Brazilian Culture and Its International Reception. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1999. Contrasts Brazilian writers with their Spanish American counterparts, and compares Andrade’s poetic persona to such “paradigmatic antiheroes” as T. S. Eliot and Franz Kafka. Lima, Luiz Costa. “Carlos Drummond de Andrade.” Latin American Writers. Vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. This lengthy essay discusses Andrade’s early work in the context of conflicting aspects of Brazilian Modernismo, his later work as evidence of “the corrosion principle,” and his even later work as the “postcorrosion phase,” in which memory is privileged over history. 267


Martins, Wilson. “Carlos Drummond de Andrade and the Heritage of Modernismo.” In Twayne Companion to Contemporary World Literature: From the Editors of World Literature Today, edited by Pamela A. Genova. New York: Twayne/Thomson Gale, 2003. Analyzes Andrade’s relationship to the Modernismo movement. Reis, Roberto. The Pearl Necklace: Toward an Archeology of the Brazilian Transition Discource. Translated by Aparecida de Godoy Johnson. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, Center for Latin American Studies, 1992. Reis reevaluates Brazilian literature written between 1850 and 1950, when the country changed from an agrarian to an urban society. He refutes the notion that literature was a force for positive cultural change, arguing that the work of Andrade and other writers was more authoritarian than rebellious in nature. Sternberg, Ricardo da Silveira Lobo. The Unquiet Self: Self and Society in the Poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Valencia, Spain: Albatros/Hispanófila, 1986. Analyzes Andrade’s work as representing the inherent conflict in the relationship between self and other(s), and the tendency toward both withdrawal from and engagement with the world. _______. “The World Within: Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s Alguma Poesia.” Luso-Brazilian Review 21, no. 2 (Winter, 1984): 57-69. Focusing on Andrade’s “first phase,” from 1930 to 1945, Sternberg examines o choque social, or social shock inherent in the conflicts between individual and society, self and others, in Andrade’s poetry.

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Martín Espada Puerto Rican poet Born: Brooklyn, New York; 1957 poetry: The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero, 1982; Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction, 1987, expanded 1994; Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands = Rebelión es el giro de manos del amante, 1990; City of Coughing and Dead Radiators: Poems, 1993; Imagine the Angels of Bread: Poems, 1996; A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen: Poems, 2000; Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 19822002, 2003. nonfiction: Zapata’s Disciple: Essays, 1998. translation: The Blood That Keeps Singing: Selected Poems of Clemente Soto Vélez, 1991 (with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo). edited texts: Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press, 1994, expanded 2000; El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry, 1997.

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artín Espada (mahr-TEEN ehs-PAH-dah) was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, by a Jewish mother and a Puerto Rican father. During the 1950’s his father, Frank Espada, became active in the Civil Rights movement. Born in Puerto Rico, Espada’s father also became one of the leaders of New York City’s Puerto Rican community. Frank Espada taught his son to recognize how difficult it has been for minorities to make a living in the United States. Martín Espada came to appreciate the need for people of color to fight against injustice and poverty. His father took his young son to political rallies. At fifteen, Espada began to write poetry. In interviews, he has stated that he became obsessed with writing and that he would rather work on a poem than even sleep. As a young adult, he held many odd jobs to help make a living, working as groundskeeper for a minor league baseball park, bouncer in a bar, and bindery worker. Through his own 269

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hard work, he witnessed firsthand the many obstacles which people of color must try to overcome. Espada learned to be a “keen observer.” He received a B.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1981 and earned a law degree from Northeastern University School of Law in 1985. He went to work at a legal-aid office, Su Clínica Legal, located in the Boston area. His wife, Katherine, gave birth to a son in 1991. Since 1993, Espada has been an English professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His first collection of poetry, The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero, was published in 1982. For his first collection, Espada included some of his father’s photographs. The title poem tells the story of his father coming to the United States. When Frank Espada was merely nine years old, he had to carry blocks of ice up flights of stairs in tenement buildings in his adopted country. As with other Latino immigrants who came to the United States in search of a better life, Espada’s father had to endure injustices in order to make his way. Espada was influenced by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Neruda wrote political poetry that spoke for the downtrodden. Espada wanted to write poems that challenged the reader as well as himself. For him, though, poetry was not to serve as propaganda; poetry should illuminate, engage, and educate. Espada’s second collection, Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction, speaks to the relationship that exists between Puerto

There is a spirit legend: that the moans of men in rusting helmets would radiate from the vine-matted walls, starved with a mouthful of bark or mad with a brain soaking in syphilis, or digging an arrowhead from the eye fired by an Indio with two hands. —from “The Other Alamo”

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Rico and the United States, wherein the United States is viewed as a shark and Puerto Rico as its prey. In 1990, he published Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands. Not wishing to limit his audience to merely readers of English, Espada included a Spanish translation for each poem. The short lyric poem “Latin Night at the Pawnshop” details the fate of various musical instruments. These instruments have been abandoned and must face a tragic fate. Espada uses the “golden trumpet,” the “silver trombone,” and the “maracas” as stand-ins for Latin culture. Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands was awarded the Paterson Poetry Prize as well as the PEN/Revson Fellowship. His fifth collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread, won the 1997 American Book Award for poetry. In a masterful fashion, Espada combines both the personal and the political in the poems of this collection. For all the injustices of the past, the poet expresses his hope that a better and more just future is possible. He takes pleasure in “the bread of the imagination, the bread of the table, and the bread of justice.” 271

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“Tony Went to the Bodega but He Didn’t Buy Anything” Espada’s poem about Tony reflects not only his own experience as a lawyer-poet but also the struggles of those who find themselves isolated or disfranchised, seeking to reconcile different cultural, educational, or social realms. Composed of forty-four lines of free verse, this poem is divided into stanzas of varying lengths that describe Tony’s maturation from elementary school to law school. Each verse encapsulates some feature of Tony’s development as he seeks his place in the world: As a fatherless Puerto Rican boy, he tries to survive the “Long Island city projects.” He takes a job at a local bodega and learns how to be polite to the abuelas (grandmothers) and how to grin at the customers. He receives a scholarship to law school away from New York but feels out of place, so he searches for a sense of belonging and finds it in a Hispanic neighborhood on Tremont Street: he sat by the doorway satisfied to watch la gente (people island-brown as him) crowd in and out, hablando espanol.

The inclusion of Spanish words and phrases shows the blend of English and Spanish that comprise Tony’s world. The vocabulary of the poem is accessible, while the diction is suggestive and imagistic. The work possesses a contemporary sensibility with its references to New York, Boston, Long Island, and Tremont Street. The irony of the poem is that Tony has the ability and opportunity to escape the Long Island projects, but as an adult he returns to a similar neighborhood because that is where he feels at home. Espada suggests that true success for Tony means returning to his Hispanic roots, where he finds a sense of belonging that he does not find in academic or professional communities. — Paula M. Miller 272

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In Espada’s 1998 collection of essays, Zapata’s Disciple, he delineates “why poetry must matter,” saying it is possible for suffering to be transformed into something positive, something beautiful. His sixth collection, A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen, continues Espada’s quest to speak up for those who do not have a voice. He is unashamedly an “advocate for the cause of freedom.” The noted author Sandra Cisneros has stated that Espada must be considered “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors,” and that she would “select him as the Poet Laureate of the United States.” In 2003 his collection Alabanza was published. This collection brings together Espada’s “earliest out-ofprint work to seventeen new poems.” The power of his poetry is clearly on display with Alabanza. As the acclaimed author Barbara Kingsolver has pointed out, a reader of Espada’s poetry cannot but “come away changed” by the experience. — Jeffry Jensen

Learn More Campo, Rafael. “Why Poetry Matters.” The Progressive 63 (April, 1999): 43-44. Campo reviews Espada’s collection of essays Zapata’s Disciple and praises the poet for his clarity of purpose and his clarity of vision. Espada, Martín. “Poetry and the Burden of History: An Interview with Martín Espada.” Interview by Steven Ratiner. The Christian Science Monitor, March 6, 1991, p. 16. Espada states that a poet can also be a historian, can put a “human face” on events. _______. “A Poetry of Legacy: An Interview with Martín Espada.” Interview by Ray Gonzalez. The Bloomsbury Review, July/ August, 1997, p. 3. Espada makes clear that his poetry definitely has been influenced by his “historical past,” his Puerto Rican father, and the birth of his son. _______. “The Politics of Advocacy: Three Poems.” Hopscotch: A Cultural Review 2 (2001): 128-133. Espada delineates what it takes to make a successful poem: A poem must be more than mere words and more than mere “important” topics. 273

Laura Esquivel Mexican novelist and screenwriter Born: Mexico City, Mexico; 1950 long fiction: Como agua para chocolate: Novela de entregas mensuales con recetas, amores, y remedios caseros, 1989 (Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies, 1992); La ley del amor, 1995 (The Law of Love, 1996); Tan veloz como el deseo, 2001 (Swift as Desire, 2001). nonfiction: Intimas suculencias, 1998 (Between Two Fires: Intimate Writings on Life, Love, Food and Flavor, 2000). screenplays: Chido One, 1985; Like Water for Chocolate, 1993 (adaptation of her novel); Estrellita Marinera, 1994 (Little Ocean Star, 1994).

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he Mexican screenwriter and novelist Laura Esquivel (lahrah ehs-kee-VEHL), who became widely known for her first published novel, Like Water for Chocolate, was raised in a middleclass family in Mexico City. She received a teaching degree from the Escuela Normal de Maestros and spent eight years teaching before embarking on a career as a writer and director of children’s theater and as a screenwriter. In 1985 she and her husband, the film director, producer, and actor Alfonso Arau, collaborated on a film project, Chido One, for which she wrote the screenplay. For this work Esquivel won a nomination from the Mexican Academy of Motion Pictures for the prestigious Ariel Award. The novel Like Water for Chocolate was widely read both in Mexico and in the United States. Once again collaborating with her husband, the author adapted the work for the screen several years later, a venture that was financially and critically successful. In fact, the internationally acclaimed film was one of the highest grossing foreign films in the United States. Among the 274

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ten Ariel awards the film received, one was for Esquivel’s screenplay. Set in Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century, Like Water for Chocolate chronicles the life of the De la Garza family, which is headed by the domineering matriarch Mamá Elena. A cruel family tradition ordains that Tita, the youngest of three daughters, is forced to care for her mother to the end of her days and thus never marry. Relegated to the kitchen, Tita learns the secrets both of food and of love from the devoted family cook, Nacha, in a relationship that evokes the author’s childhood memories of her grandmother’s kitchen. Indeed, as this tale unfolds, the scenery changes from that of northern Mexico to that of San Antonio, which is reminiscent of Esquivel’s own childhood, when she often traveled with her family to visit rela-

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Like Water for Chocolate Like Water for Chocolate (1989) combines the story of a forbidden romance between Tita de la Garza and Pedro Muzquiz with a collection of traditional Mexican recipes. The title, from a Spanish expression meaning “boiling mad” (como agua para chocolate), refers to Tita’s anger at an absurd family tradition that prevents her from marrying, dictating that, as the youngest daughter, she must remain at home to care for her mother, Mamá Elena. The narrator is Tita’s grandniece, who reconstructs Tita’s recipes and her love story from her diary. Tita’s true love, Pedro Muzquiz, requests her hand in marriage. When Mamá Elena explains that Tita cannot marry and suggests Tita’s sister Rosaura instead, Pedro accepts in order to remain near Tita. The novel recounts Tita and Pedro’s attempts to be together and Tita’s rebellion through her culinary artistry. Tita sheds tears in the batter when forced to prepare Rosaura and Pedro’s wedding cake, and her sadness, baked into the cake, afflicts the wedding guests with desperate nostalgia for lost love that causes a mass eruption of vomiting. Such unexplain-

tives in her mother’s hometown of Piedras Negras and in San Antonio. As the title suggests, Like Water for Chocolate is written in cookbook style. Each chapter begins with a monthly recipe for an authentic Mexican dish; all the recipes, purported to be from the author’s own family collection, are interwoven in the text of the book. Often compared with Gabriel García Márquez, Esquivel imbues her story with the quality of a fairy tale that is populated with spirits, extraordinary events, and exaggerated plot lines. Food is an especially magical force, through which the repressed passions of Tita and other main characters are revealed as they live their lives “like water for chocolate,” seething under the surface with sexual desire and rage. 276

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able events are typical of the Magical Realism found in many Latin American narratives. Rosaura, inept in the kitchen, cannot produce milk to nurse her first child, Roberto. Tita rescues him from starvation, but Mamá Elena, suspicious of Pedro and Tita’s love, sends Rosaura’s family to Texas. Deprived of Tita’s milk, Roberto dies. Tita suffers a nervous breakdown but recovers in the care of the family’s physician, John Brown, who proposes marriage. When Mamá Elena dies, Tita is finally free to marry John but refuses because of her love for Pedro. Meanwhile, Rosaura attempts to perpetuate the family tradition with her own daughter Esperanza. Tita feeds her from infancy and instills in her an independent spirit. Rosaura eventually suffers a horrid death from intestinal disorders. Esperanza then marries John’s son, and at the wedding feast prepared by Tita, she and Pedro are at last united. Their flames of passion, fanned by the food Tita serves, engulf the lovers in a fire that destroys the entire ranch. Only Tita’s diary survives intact. The narrator, Esperanza’s daughter, closes the novel with the promise that Tita will live as long as people continue to prepare her recipes. — Janice A. Jaffe

In the foreword to the cookbook An Appetite for Passion, Esquivel comments, “I wrote my first novel with the intention of giving the transferring of love in the kitchen the appreciation it deserves. I am convinced, just as Tita is in my novel, that we can impregnate food with emotion, just as we can every other activity we engage in. When this affective charge is powerful, it is impossible for it to pass unnoticed. Others feel it, touch it, enjoy it. I find confirmation of that each day that passes.” After their collaboration on Like Water for Chocolate Esquivel completed two other screenplays for Arau, from whom she was later divorced. The first, Little Ocean Star, was written for children. The second, unproduced screenplay was based on Antonio Velasco Piña’s 1987 novel Regina, about a female Christ. In 277

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Azucena’s bedroom was then transformed into a laboratory filled with computers for the ensuing documentary on how crime had been abolished from Planet Earth. This had resulted from the development of an apparatus that, from a single drop of blood or saliva, a broken fingernail or a hair, could reconstruct the entire body of a person and indicate his whereabouts. —from The Law of Love

the 1990’s Esquivel began work on the novel The Law of Love, the screenplay of which she was commissioned to prepare for a film project with Robert Redford. Esquivel also agreed to do an original screenplay for the filmmaker Sydney Pollack. The Law of Love appeared in 1996, a combination of science fiction and Magical Realism that relates the picaresque adventures of a twenty-third century “astroanalyst” searching her past lives for her lover and encountering Montezuma and a diabolical Mother Teresa along the way; the novel was accompanied by a music CD and full-color illustrations by Miguelano Prado in an at times incoherent but nevertheless bold attempt to fuse narrative with other media. In 2001, Esquivel returned to the novel proper with another magical story, a tribute to her dead father, Swift as Desire, which attempts to uncover the mystery of why the author-persona’s parents, once deeply in love, eventually stopped communicating. Making this silence all the more poignant is the novel’s protagonist, Julio (who is to become Esquivel’s father), born with a gift for interpreting both the natural world and people’s hearts. Esquivel traces his life from his miraculous childhood to his deathbed, where the daughter finally is able to communicate with him. — Joan F. Marx

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Learn More Gant-Britton, Lisbeth. “Mexican Women and Chicanas Enter Futuristic Fiction.” In Future Females, the Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism, edited by Marleen S. Barr. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Discusses the elements of futuristic fiction in La ley del amor. Giannotti, Janet. A Companion Text for “Like Water for Chocolate.” Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Written for students studying English as a second language who are reading the novel’s English translation. Hoeveler, Diane Long. “Like Words for Pain/Like Water for Chocolate: Mouths, Wombs, and the Mexican Woman’s Novel.” In Women of Color: Defining the Issues, Hearing the Voices, edited by Diane Long Hoeveler and Janet K. Boles. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Analyzes how Esquivel handles the themes of love and pain in her novel. Jaffe, Janice. “Hispanic American Women Writers’ Novel Recipes and Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate).” Women’s Studies 22, no. 2 (1993). Valuable for its feminist critique of the novel’s female characters. O’Neill, Molly. “Sensing the Spirit in All Things, Seen and Unseen.” The New York Times Biographical Service 24, no. 3 (March, 1993). Biographical information. Segovia, Miguel A. “Only Cauldrons Know the Secrets of Their Soups: Queer Romance in Like Water for Chocolate.” In Velvet Barrios: Culture and Chicana/o Sexualities, edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alva. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Examines the treatment of women and their relationship to food in Like Water for Chocolate. Taylor, Claire. Bodies and Texts: Configurations of Identity in the Works of Griselda Gambaro, Albalucía Angel, and Laura Esquivel. Leeds, England: Maney, 2003. Analyzes the formation of feminine identity in Como agua para chocolate and La ley del amor.

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José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi Mexican novelist Born: Mexico City, Mexico; November 15, 1776 Died: Mexico City, Mexico; June 21, 1827 Also known as: El Pensador Mexicano (pseudonym) long fiction: Vida y hechos del famoso caballero Don Catrín de la Fachenda, 1822 (novella); El periquillo sarniento, 1816 (The Itching Parrot, 1912). nonfiction: Noches tristes y día alegre, 1818 (autobiography); La Quijotita y su prima, 1818-1819 (2 volumes), revised as La Quijotita y su prima, 1831-1832 (4 volumes). miscellaneous: Obras, 1963-1995 (13 volumes).

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osé Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (hoh-SAY hwah-KEEN fehr-NAHN-days thay lee-SAHR-dee) had no college education, but he taught himself French, and so came under the influence of French philosophy. In 1819 he commented on Jean-

With so many godparents around, I could not escape my christening. When I went off to school, I wore a green coat and yellow pants. These colors, and the fact that my teacher sometimes affectionately called me not Pedro but Pedrillo, furnished my friends with my nickname, Periquillo, or Little Parrot. But I still needed some kind of adjective to distinguish me from another Parrot we already had. —from The Itching Parrot (trans. David Frye)

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Jacques Rousseau’s ideas of education in La Quijotita y su prima (little Miss Quixote and her cousin). In 1812, taking advantage of the short-lived Constitution of Cádiz and its guarantee of freedom of the press, he founded the paper El Pensador Mexicano (the Mexican thinker), a name he subsequently used as his pseudonym. Soon after that he was imprisoned, but over the years he founded a number of other short-lived papers in which he propagated liberal ideas and worked for Mexico’s independence. He also wrote poetry and drama, and in the autobiographical dialogues about his sufferings during the struggle for independence, Noches tristes y día alegre (sad nights and happy day), he introduced Romantic prose to the New World. Fernández de Lizardi is perhaps best remembered as the author of the first Latin American novel, The Itching Parrot, a title deriving from a pun on the name of the chief character, Pedro Sarmiento, whose schoolboy costume of green coat and yellow trousers earned him the nickname of “Parrot.” This picaresque novel criticized social customs at the end of Mexico’s viceregal period. In the novel a dying and repentant pícaro tells his life as a lesson for his sons. Because he frequently changed jobs and traveled, the narrative covers a broad social and geographic 281


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The Itching Parrot The Itching Parrot (1816), Fernández de Lizardi’s masterpiece, is often considered the first Spanish American novel. It describes the picaresque misadventures of Pedro, a young man driven by hunger and poverty to make his way in the world, in which he must, he says, cheat to survive. The book employs slapstick humor as it narrates Pedro’s experiences in a series of apprenticeships, where he learns trades ranging from the socially prestigious (doctor’s assistant, sacristan’s assistant) to the dubious (croupier, cardsman) to the illegal (thief). Fernández de Lizardi inserts long, moralizing passages that describe the meaning of the events. Most critics agree that the main aim of the novel is to show the abuse of power in colonial New Spain. In Spanish America, the growth of the professional classes— doctors, lawyers, merchants, suppliers, and printers—was accompanied by the growth of a parasitic group of unqualified and dishonest professionals, whom the novel satirizes. Even the protagonist becomes the object of scorn and ridicule: Pedro takes great pains to list the circumstances of his upbringing to justify his wayward ways. He assigns blame to his parents’ lack of education and of concern for his upbringing, and, in particular, their frequent recourse to wet-nurses. The moralistic intention of such passages, is transparent, and Pedro’s credibility as a narrator is diminished as a result. When Pedro is shipwrecked on an island in the Pacific Ocean, he finds himself obliged to justify the customs of his native land to a skeptical Chinese chieftain. In describing these customs (such as the idea that nobles cannot work because work is beneath them), Pedro makes them sound absurd. His stupidity is revealed when he not only fails to recognize a plant but completely misdiagnoses its medicinal function. It becomes clear that the novel’s satire is directed squarely at Spanish American society. — Stephen M. Hart

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spectrum, including a utopian island in the Pacific. There is a strong moralizing and pedagogic note, and at the same time the obsolete science on which the work is based gives the novel an unintentionally humorous quality. The publication of the novel’s first sixteen chapters brought Fernández political difficulties, so complete publication was delayed until after his death. Censorship did not prevent him, however, from writing several other novels and many political pamphlets for which he was excommunicated and imprisoned. The novella Vida y hechos del famoso caballero Don Catrín de la Fachenda (the life and works of the famous gentleman Don Catrín de la Fachenda) is more playful because the story is told by an unreliable narrator, an unrepentant pícaro. — Emil Volek Learn More Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, and Susan Griswold, trans. “José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi and the Emergence of the Spanish Novel as National Project.” In The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited in Latin America, edited by Doris Sommer. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. Examines the development of the Mexican novel, focusing on Fernández de Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento. Stavans, Ilan, ed. Mutual Impressions: Writers from the Americas Reading One Another. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. A collection of essays, in which writers from North America analyze works by South American writers, and South Americans analyze North Americans’ works. One of the essays is by Katharine Anne Porter, who describes how Fernández de Lizardi’s picaresque tale, El periquillo sarniento, was the first Latin American novel. Unzueta, Fernando. “The Nineteenth Century Novel: Toward a Public Sphere or a Mass Media?” In Latin American Literature and Mass Media, edited by Edmundo Paz-Soldán and Debra A. Castillo. Hispanic Issues 22. New York: Garland, 2001. This analysis of El periquillo sarniento compares Fernández de Lizardi’s novel to the work of his contemporary, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano. 283


Vogeley, Nancy. “A Latin American Enlightenment Version of the Picaresque: Lizardi’s Don Catrín de la Fachenda.” In The Picaresque: A Symposium on the Rogue’s Tale, edited by Carmen Benito-Vessels and Michael Zappala. Newark, N.J.: University of Delaware Press, 1994. An analysis of the picaresque elements in the novel. _______. Lizardi and the Birth of the Novel in Spanish America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. Traces the development of the Mexican novel. Vogeley describes how Fernández de Lizardi introduced the genre to Mexico when he wrote El periqueillo sarniento, which became a symbol of the emerging Mexican nation.

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Rosario Ferré Puerto Rican novelist, poet, biographer, and critic Born: Ponce, Puerto Rico; 1938 long fiction: Maldito amor, 1986 (Sweet Diamond Dust, 1988); La batalla de las virgenas, 1993; The House on the Lagoon, 1995; Eccentric Neighborhoods, 1998; Flight of the Swan, 2001. short fiction: Papeles de Pandora, 1976 (The Youngest Doll, 1991); Las dos Venecias, 1992. poetry: Sonatinas, 1989; Language Duel/Duelo de Lenguaje, 2002. nonfiction: Sitio a Eros: Trece ensayos literarios, 1980; El árbol y sus sombras, 1989; Memorias de Ponce: Autobiografia de Luis A. Ferré, 1992; A la sombra de tu nombre, 2001.

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osario Ferré (roh-ZAHR-ee-oh fah-RAY) is considered Puerto Rico’s leading woman of letters. Ferré is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico and also a contributor to The San Juan Star newspaper. A prolific writer, she has published fiction, poetry, criticism, essays, and biography. Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, to a family with position in both politics and business, Ferré was educated at Manhattanville College, the Uni-

I always knew when we were driving to Emajaguas because Cristóbal Bocanegra, our black chauffeur, would start whistling softly as soon as he was told of the trip. Cristóbal had a good-looking girlfriend in Guayamés, and when we traveled there he always spent the night with her, happy to get away from his wife. —from Eccentric Neighborhoods 285

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versity of Puerto Rico, and the University of Maryland, College Park, where she earned a Ph.D. in Latin American literature in 1987. Her writing career began in the 1970’s with her position as editor and publisher of Zona de carga y descarga, a student-generated journal concentrating on new Puerto Rican literature. She has also taught at Rutgers University, Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, The Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. She has been awarded an honorary doctorate from Brown University. In addition, from 1977 to 1980, her column of literary criticism was published in El Mundo, a Puerto Rican newspaper.

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The House on the Lagoon The House on the Lagoon (1995) tells the story of the Mendizabal family, beginning in the 1880’s and focusing on the period from July 4, 1917, when Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship, to the day of a hotly contested plebiscite on statehood in 1993, when fictional independentistas staged a takeover. Ferré interweaves the family’s passions and struggles with the history of Puerto Rico and its changing relations with Spain and the United States. The main characters, Quintín Mendizabal and his wife, Isabel Monfort, have conflicting political views. Isabel advocates Puerto Rican independence; Quintín supports close ties with the United States. Quintín believes in traditional women’s roles; Isabel advocates feminism. They also disagree about the novel Isabel is writing, a history that includes stories about her family as well as her husband’s family. One day Quintín discovers his wife’s manuscript hidden in a bookcase. Beginning with marginal notes and condescending comments, Quintín ultimately writes his own interpretation of events and becomes the novel’s

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Ferré also wrote a biography of her father, Luis Ferré, the pro-statehood governor of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico from 1968 to 1972, but she is best known for her fiction. Her nonfiction essays in Zona de carga y descarga reflected her ideals of social reform and independent politics. This journal was the outcome of an idea generated in a master’s degree class at the University of Puerto Rico. With other students, she founded a journal that offered an opportunity for publication to many young Puerto Rican writers who later became famous. Ferré’s feminist ideas also formed the basis for her short stories. Her children’s literature, including fables and short stories, contains messages concerning the need for social and polit-

second narrator. He corrects glaring anachronisms, protests scandalous portrayals of his family’s and his own behavior, and rewrites the stories from his own perspective. When Isabel’s manuscript reveals his ruthless business practices, his complicity in the suicide of one of his brothers, and his harsh treatment of his rebellious sons, he feels threatened and decides to suppress her version of the truth. When all else fails, she decides to leave him and he resorts to violence. At the end of the novel, Isabel finds the courage to defend herself and her children; she hits Quintín with an iron bar, killing him. Within this dual version of history, Ferré also maps out a geography of the haves and the have-nots on the island, centering the action on the Mendizabal family’s San Juan mansion. Upstairs are the Mendizabals, with their materially successful fusion of Spanish conquistador and American capitalist methods, their hot tempers, and their self-destructive habits. Downstairs are the servants, the wise and patient Avilés family, brought as slaves from Angola in the eighteenth century. The Mendizabal patriarchs meet their match in elderly Petra Avilés, granddaughter of an African-born rebel slave. Threatened with censorship and control by her husband, Isabel finds natural allies in Petra and her family. — Genevieve Slomski

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ical reform. Ferré’s fiction in the form of short stories and novels for adults tells the stories of women in her culture who struggle with issues of class, race, and economic status. In stories like “The Youngest Doll,” she explores the conflicts between cultural expectations for women in a changing Puerto Rican society and the common human need for decency and respect. The use of symbolism and allegory in this story are reflected in many of her longer works. Influenced by her family (her mother was from the landed gentry, and her father was an industrialist before he became a politician), Ferré writes of the struggles of women of this culture between duty and personal needs. Early in her career, she was important primarily to feminist academics, until the publication of The House on the Lagoon in 1995. This is the first of her novels written initially in English. Upon its publication, she received international attention with her nomination for the National Book Award. Ferré’s recent novels are written in English, but her poetry is published only in Spanish. Many of her works, including Sweet Diamond Dust and The House on the Lagoon, illustrate the ties between Puerto Rico and Spain as well as the United States. Through multilevel plots dealing with generational conflict and gender constraints, Ferré explores what life is and has been like for people, both men and women, of Puerto Rican descent. Her use of layered time frames, wide plot scope, and vivid language has been compared to Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez. Her stories of the people and the rich culture of her homeland provide an opportunity for readers to learn and appreciate her Caribbean heritage. — Dolores A. D’Angelo Learn More Castillo, Debra A. “Surfacing: Rosario Ferré and Julieta Campos, with Rosario Castellanos.” In Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Debra Castillo. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. Castillo analyzes the work of Ferré and other writers to establish a feminist criticism that can be applied to the diverse range of Latin American feminist authors. 288

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Erro-Peralta, Nora, and Caridad Silva, eds. Beyond the Border: A New Age in Latin American Women’s Fiction. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000. A collection of 15 short stories about characters who transcend their familiar experiences. Includes Ferré’s story “Mercedes-Benz 220 SL” and a bibliography of her work. Ferré, Rosario. “Interview with Rosario Ferré.” Interview by Magdalena García Pinto. Translated by Trudy Balch and Magdalena García Pinto. In Women Writers of Latin America: Intimate Histories. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Ferré and other women discuss the personal, social, and political factors that have shaped their writing careers. Henao, Eda B. The Colonel Subject’s Search for Nation, Culture, and Identity in the Works of Julia Alvarez, Rosario Ferré, and Ana Lydia Vega. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 2003. Examines fiction written in English and Spanish by women writers from the Dominican Republican and the Puerto Rican cultures. Describes how these writers’ works challenge traditional and stereotypical assumptions about the representation of women. Hintz, Susanne H. Rosario Ferré: A Search for Identity. New York: Lang, 1995. Ferré has created a personal and comprehensive approach to feminist literature. Hintz uses Ferré’s theories of feminist literary criticism to analyze Ferré’s writing. Lindsay, Claire. Locating Latin American Women Writers: Cristina Peri Rossi, Rosario Ferré, Albalucía Angel, and Isabel Allende. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. A study of short fiction by four Latin American women writers, including Ferré.

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Maria Irene Fornes Cuban American playwright Born: Havana, Cuba; May 14, 1930 drama: The Widow, pr., pb. 1961; There, You Died!, pr. 1963, revised pr. 1964, pb. 1971 (as Tango Palace); The Successful Life of Three, pr. 1965, pb. 1971; Promenade, pr. 1965, pb. 1971 (music by Al Carmines); The Office, pr. 1966; A Vietnamese Wedding, pr. 1967, pb. 1971; The Annunciation, pr. 1967; Dr. Kheal, pr. 1968, pb. 1971; The Red Burning Light: Or, Mission XQ3, pr. 1968, pb. 1971; Molly’s Dream, pr. 1968, pb. 1971; The Curse of Langston House, pr. 1972; Aurora, pr. 1974; Cap-a-Pie, pr. 1975; Fefu and Her Friends, pr. 1977, pb. 1980; Lolita in the Garden, pr. 1977; In Service, pr. 1978; Eyes on the Harem, pr. 1979; Evelyn Brown: A Diary, pr. 1980; Blood Wedding, pr. 1980 (adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s play); Life Is a Dream, pr. 1981 (adaptation of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s play); A Visit, pr. 1981; The Danube, pr. 1982; Mud, pr. 1983, pb. 1986; Abingdon Square, pr. 1984, pb. 1988; Sarita, pr. 1984, pb. 1986; No Time, pr. 1984; The Conduct of Life, pr. 1985, pb. 1986; Lovers and Keepers, pr. 1986, pb. 1987 (music by Tito Puente); Drowning, pr. 1986, pb. 1987 (adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s story); And What of the Night?, pr. 1989; Oscar and Bertha, pr. 1991; Enter the Night, pr. 1993, pb. 1996; Balseros, pr. 1996; Summer in Gossensass, pr. 1998; Letters from Cuba, pr. 2000.

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aria Irene Fornes (mah-REE-ah i-REEN fawr-NAYS) was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1930. Her father did not believe in formal schooling, so she attended only the third through sixth grades. After her father’s death, she went to New York in 1945 with her widowed mother and became a naturalized American citizen in 1951. She worked at a variety of menial jobs. Her first artistic interest was painting, and in 1954 she began studying with Hans Hofmann. She spent three years in Eu-

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rope in the mid-1950’s. During this time, she has said, she knew nothing about theater, but she did see the first production of Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot (1952; Waiting for Godot, 1954) in Paris, an experience that she has described as profound. She credits this performance and her reading of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890; English translation, 1891) with inspiring her to become a playwright several years later.

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The Conduct of Life Perhaps Fornes’s best-known play, The Conduct of Life (1986) partners violence against women with political violence. The play centers on the figure of Orlando, who is the head of his household and also an army officer involved in state-sponsored torture. Orlando mocks his wife, Leticia, and dominates his household, including Olympia, his housekeeper. He also beats and rapes Nena, a twelve-year-old girl whom he keeps in the basement for his sexual pleasures. As the action progresses, Fornes shows how violence breeds more violence: Leticia finally rebels and kills Orlando. She then gives the gun to Nena, and the play ends with her asking Nena to shoot her as well. The Conduct of Life shows Fornes’s continuing concern with the intersection of gender, power, and violence. Olympia survives because she is able to dismiss Orlando despite his threats, and Nena survives her brutal ordeal through a Christ-like acceptance of others’ pain. Orlando is only able to perform sexually if violence is involved. He rapes Nena and forces himself on his wife at the end of the play. Leticia, who tries to endure this world, finally resorts to violence. With these characters, Fornes explores many different ways in which power and gender interact and shows how oppression breeds violence and hatred. — David Jortner

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Fornes returned to New York in 1957 and worked as a textile designer. She developed a relationship with Susan Sontag, who at that time wanted to become a writer. According to Fornes, she started writing as a kind of game to encourage Sontag; both women found success fairly rapidly. Fornes’s play There, You Died! was produced by the Actors’ Workshop in San Francisco in 1963. That same year, Fornes joined the playwriting unit of the Actors Studio in New York, which produced the same play under the title Tango Palace in 1964. In 1965 she won her first Obie (Off-Broadway award) for Distinguished Plays, for Promenade and The Successful Life of Three. Although she is not as acclaimed in mainstream theater as her fans would like her to be, Fornes has been a force in Offand Off-Off-Broadway theater. She has written more than forty plays, has directed many of her own and other productions, and has been actively involved in supporting other women and Latino playwrights. She cofounded the Women’s Theater Council in 1972, with the purpose of supporting the writing and production of new plays by American women. In 1978 she began teaching Playwrights Workshop at INTAR (International Arts Relations), and in 1981 she became director of INTAR’s Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Laboratory, a national program to support Hispanic playwrights. She won additional Obies in 1977 (Playwriting, for Fefu and Her Friends), 1979 (Direction, for Eyes on the Harem), 1982 (Sus-

“Thirty-three and I’m still a lieutenant. In two years I’ll receive a promotion or I’ll leave the military. I promise I will not spend time feeling sorry for myself. —Instead I will study the situation and draw an effective plan of action. —I must eliminate all obstacles. —I will make the acquaintance of people in high power.” —from The Conduct of Life

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tained Achievement), 1984 (Playwriting and Direction, for The Danube, Sarita, and Mud), 1985 (Playwriting, for The Conduct of Life), and 1988 (Best New American Play, for Abingdon Square). She has also been awarded numerous grants and fellowships (Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and the National Endowment for the Arts among them) and is sought after as a teacher and lecturer, both in the United States and abroad. In 1999 the Signature Theater Company in New York did a season-long retrospective of Fornes’s work. Critics and scholars find it impossible to compartmentalize the works of Fornes. Many regard her as a realistic playwright, but her plays also experiment with avant-garde techniques, expressionist and Cuban and American influences, and the influences of Ibsen, Beckett, and Bertolt Brecht. She eschews political and formal labels and emphasizes writing as a process of inventing, of always remaining on new ground. If the constant is her experimentation, the measure of her success is the number of contemporary playwrights who acknowledge her influence. Fellow dramatist Paula Vogel has noted that for these playwrights, there are only two stages—before and after reading Maria Irene Fornes. — Elsie Galbreath Haley Learn More Bottoms, Stephen J. Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960’s Off-off Broadway Movement. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. A history of New York City’s underground theater in the 1960’s, explaining how “off-off Broadway” productions launched the careers of Fornes and other playwrights. Delgado, Maria M., and Caridad Svetch, eds. Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of Maria Irene Fornes. Lyme, N.H.: Smith and Kraus, 1999. A collection of works on Fornes by those with whom she has worked in theater, those who have studied playwrighting with her, and scholars and critics who have followed her career. Also included is an interview with Fornes, commenting on her life in theater since the 1960’s. 293

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Kent, Assunta Bartolomucci. Maria Irene Fornes and Her Critics. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Kent analyzes the social critique contained in Fornes’s published works, arguing that most critics have failed to examine this crucial aspect of Fornes’s plays. Moroff, Diane Lynn. Fornes: Theater in the Present Tense. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. A critical analysis of four of Fornes’s plays: Fefu and Her Friends, Mud, Sarita, and The Conduct of Life. Also contains chronologies of selected productions of plays, publications, and honors and awards that Fornes has received. Porterfield, Sally. “Black Cats and Green Trees: The Art of Maria Irene Fornes.” Modern Drama 43 (Summer, 2000): 204-212. Porterfield talks with the playwright and looks at some of her plays, trying to understand the “universe of Fornes’s artistic imagination.” Robinson, Marc, ed. The Theater of Maria Irene Fornes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. A useful collection of critical essays on Fornes’s plays, reviews and essays on performances of those plays, and a selection of Fornes’s own writing on her work. Contains photographs of productions of fifteen of the plays.

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Carlos Fuentes Mexican novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and critic Born: Panama City, Panama; November 11, 1928 long fiction: La región más transparente, 1958 (Where the Air Is Clear, 1960); Las buenas conciencias, 1959 (The Good Conscience, 1961); La muerte de Artemio Cruz, 1962 (The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1964); Aura, 1962 (novella; English translation, 1965); Zona sagrada, 1967 (novella; Holy Place, 1972); Cambio de piel, 1967 (A Change of Skin, 1968); Cumpleaños, 1969 (novella); Terra nostra, 1975 (English translation, 1976); La cabeza de la hidra, 1978 (The Hydra Head, 1978); Una familia lejana, 1980 (Distant Relations, 1982); Gringo viejo, 1985 (The Old Gringo, 1985); Cristóbal nonato, 1987 (Christopher Unborn, 1989); La Campaña, 1990 (The Campaign, 1991; first volume of trilogy El tiempo romantico); Diana: O, La Cazadora Solitaria, 1994 (Diana, the Goddess Who Hunts Alone, 1995); Los años con Laura Díaz, 1999 (The Years with Laura Diaz, 2000); Instinto de Inez, 2001 (Inez, 2002); La silla del águila, 2003. short fiction: Los días enmascarados, 1954; Cantar de ciegos, 1964; Poemas de amor: Cuentos del alma, 1971; Chac Mool y otros cuentos, 1973; Agua quemada, 1980 (Burnt Water, 1980); Constancia, y otras novelas para vírgenes, 1989 (Constancia, and Other Stories for Virgins, 1990); Días enmascarados, 1990 (includes Los días enmascarados and Cantar de ciegos); El naranjo: O, Los círculos del tiempo, 1993 (The Orange Tree, 1994); La frontera de cristal: Una novela en nueve cuentos, 1995 (The Crystal Frontier: A Novel in Nine Stories, 1997); Inquieta compañía, 2004. drama: Todos los gatos son pardos, pb. 1970; El tuerto es rey, pb. 1970; Orquídeas a la luz de la luna, pb. 1982 (Orchids in the Moonlight, 1982); Ceremonias del alba, revised edition pb. 1991. screenplays: El acoso, 1958 (with Luis Buñuel; adaptation of Alejo Carpentier’s novel); Children of Sanchez, 1961 (with Ab295

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bey Mann; adaptation of Oscar Lewis’s work); Pedro Páramo, 1966; Tiempo de morir, 1966; Los caifanes, 1967. nonfiction: The Argument of Latin America: Words for North Americans, 1963; Paris: La revolución de mayo, 1968; La nueva novela hispanoamericana, 1969; El mundo de José Luis Cuevas, 1969; Casa con dos puertas, 1970; Tiempo mexicano, 1971; Los reinos originarios: Teatro hispano-mexicano, 1971; Cervantes: O, La crítica de la lectura, 1976 (Cervantes: Or, The Critique of Reading, 1976); Myself with Others: Selected Essays, 1988; Valiente mundo nuevo: Épica, utopía y mito en la novela, 1990; El espejo enterrado, 1992 (The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World, 1992); Geografia de la novela, 1993; Tres discursos para dos aldeas, 1993; Nuevo tiempo mexicano, 1994 (A New Time for Mexico, 1996); Latin America: At War with the Past, 2001; En esto creo, 2002 (This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life, 2005); Viendo visiones, 2003; Contra Bush, 2004. edited text: The Vintage Book of Latin American Stories, 2000 (with Julio Ortega).

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arlos Fuentes (KAHR-lohs FWAYN-tays) gained international recognition as a significant writer associated with the so-called boom period in Latin American literature, and he came to be regarded by many as Mexico’s foremost novelist in the twentieth century. The son of a career diplomat, Rafael Fuentes, and Berta Macias Rivas, Carlos Fuentes grew up in many different countries and attended excellent schools in several of the major capitals of the Americas. He learned English at the age of four while living in Washington, D.C., and for a time he lived in Santiago, Chile, and in Buenos Aires, before returning to study law at the University of Mexico. He also spent some time at the Institut des Hautes Études Internationales in Geneva. From 1950 to 1952 Fuentes was a member of the Mexican delegation to the International Labor Organization in Geneva. Upon his return to Mexico in 1954 he became assistant head of the press section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and from 1955 to 1956 he served in a similar capacity at the University of Mexico. During much of the time that he was head of the department of cultural relations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

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Terra nostra Fuentes’s reorganization of time is the principal structural element of his masterpiece, Terra nostra (1975). This massive, Byzantine work, an ambitious blend of history and fiction, is nothing less than a compendium of Western civilization. In a narrower sense, the focus of the work is Latino civilization and the historical background of the epoch of discovery and conquest. In keeping with Fuentes’s goals for fiction, the work succeeds in erasing temporal and spatial boundaries and becomes timeless, circular, and meticulously constructed. Fuentes places the reader at the center of a maelstrom of times and places. The novel is divided into three sections, “The Old World,” “The New World,” and “The Next World.” Within “The Old World,” time abruptly shifts, creating an excursion into the wellsprings of Latino culture. The reader emerges in the Spain of Philip II, the monarch who built the Escorial. The erection of the mausoleum by El Señor, the embodiment of the Spanish monarch, is a metaphor of Philip’s (and, by extension, Spain’s) mad obsession with halting the passage of time.

from 1957 to 1959, he was also editor of Revista mexicana de literatura; he later edited and coedited the leftist journals El espectador, Siempre, and Política. After 1959 he devoted himself to writing novels, book reviews, political essays, film scripts, and plays. From 1975 to 1977 he served as Mexico’s ambassador to France. Fuentes was married to the well-known Mexican actress Rita Macedo in 1959, with whom he had a daughter. The marriage ended in divorce in 1969, and in 1973 he married Sylvia Lemus, with whom he had a son and a daughter. Fundamentally a realist, Fuentes’s search for the quintessence of Mexican reality often led him to its mythological roots. Yet for him Mexico’s Aztec, Christian, or revolutionary past is 298

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El Señor’s attempt to resist change proves futile in the second part of the novel, which chronicles the discovery and conquest of the New World. The promise of new lands and a new vision of time fire the imagination of the Old World. “The Ancient,” an indigenous patriarch reminiscent of Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, captures this vision in his retelling of a tribal legend, in which a new reckoning of time embodies the perpetual change that threatens the stagnation of the Old World. El Señor, the defender of temporal paralysis, recoils at the threat in the last part of the novel and ultimately fails to freeze Latino tradition within the confines of the sixteenth century. His decree that the New World, with its nonlinear passage of time, does not exist is repudiated in an exuberant celebration of change in the novel’s conclusion, when the action returns to Paris in the twentieth century. In addition to the abrupt shifts in time and space, employed in a particularly radical form in Terra nostra, Fuentes exploits other modern literary techniques: hallucinatory imagery, stream of consciousness, interior monologue, and numerous devices adapted from the cinema, including flashback, crosscutting, fades, and multiple points of view. — Howard Fraser

not merely a literary theme but a powerful force to be reckoned with in representing society. The principal concern of his fiction is the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and the failure of its promises, a subject that earned him both the hostility of the Mexican establishment and the admiration of a new generation that looked to him for ideological leadership. Fuentes began his literary career with a collection of short stories, Los días enmascarados (masked days), published in 1954. In this work he denounces customs and primitive modes of life that he views as a burden to modern Mexican life. He develops this subject matter further in Where the Air Is Clear, a phenomenal and influential first novel, in which he attempts to create both a 299

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He dreamed he was crossing a flaming bridge. He awakened. He wasn’t dreaming. He’d seen the bridge that morning as he crossed into Mexico. But now as he gazed at the stars the old man said to himself: “My eyes shine brighter than any star. No one will ever see me old and decrepit. I will always be young because today I dare to be young again. I will always be remembered as I was.” —from The Old Gringo

“biography of a city” and a “synthesis of present-day Mexico.” A panorama of the Mexico City of the early 1950’s, the novel is filled with insights into a country whose social revolution soon ceased to be truly revolutionary. Through his range of characters Fuentes investigates the essence of twentieth century Mexicans and their many formative influences and finds no foundation—no shared philosophy or sense of purpose—that would prevent the strong from preying upon the weak. The suppression of the revolutionary instinct is the focus of The Good Conscience, a more conventional novel that Fuentes intended as the first volume in a planned tetralogy he later abandoned. The Death of Artemio Cruz, the novel that achieved world fame for him, is a richly orchestrated historical novel once again depicting the failure of the revolution, this time through the eyes of the dying robber baron Artemio Cruz, who recalls scenes from his life. In the novel, as in Where the Air Is Clear, Fuentes presents a panoramic view of recent Mexican history. In both The Death of Artemio Cruz and Terra nostra Fuentes uses a variety of narrators to tell his story, as well as the technique of secondperson narrative. A Change of Skin describes, at the narrative level, the pilgrimage of five characters from Mexico City to Vera Cruz for Holy Week. The book’s more fundamental concern, however, is with human beings’ primitive and persistent notions of vengeance and atonement. Some critics found the book sym300

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bolically overburdened, yet other readers found A Change of Skin to be a work close to greatness in its scope, energy, and skill of characterization. Although most critics agree that The Death of Artemio Cruz is Fuentes’s most technically successful novel, others believe that the bulk of his work is more clever than substantial; they find that he neglects the most important feature of his subcontinent’s culture: the Indianist problem. Perhaps the most valuable contributions of Fuentes’s writing are that it has introduced experimental techniques into mainstream Latin American fiction and it has helped to define the Mexican national character. — Genevieve Slomski Learn More Boldy, Steven. The Narrative of Carlos Fuentes: Family, Text, Nation. Durham, England: University of Durham, 2002. An examination of ten novels, short stories, and novellas written from 1958 through 1995, exploring common themes and demonstrating how Fuentes’s work evolved in these years. Faris, Wendy B. Carlos Fuentes. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983. Faris’s book offers both biographical information and an insightful critical assessment of Fuentes’s early novels, short fiction, and plays. Complemented by a useful bibliography, a chronology, and an index. Fuentes, Carlos. “Carlos Fuentes.” http://www.clubcultura.com/ clubliteratura/clubescritores/carlosfuentes/bienve.htm. Accessed March 22, 2005. This bilingual Web site contains a biography, several interesting letters and essays by writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Milan Kundera, lists of books about Fuentes, and information about his current activities. Guzmán, Daniel de. Carlos Fuentes. New York: Twayne, 1972. The author provides a brief but insightful view of the historical context (specifically, the Mexican Revolution) of Fuentes’s fiction. Guzman’s book also includes a select bibliography, an appraisal of the author’s works, a historical and sociocultural background, and a chronology of Fuentes’s works. 301

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Helmuth, Chalene. The Postmodern Fuentes. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1997. Studies the postmodern features in Fuentes’s novels, focusing on works written since 1975. Ibsen, Kristine. Author, Text, and Reader in the Novels of Carlos Fuentes. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. A reader-oriented analysis of four major novels: A Change of Skin, Terra nostra, Distant Relations, and Christopher Unborn. Penn, Sheldon. Carlos Fuentes’s “Terra nostra” and the Kabbalah: The Recreation of the Hispanic World. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003. Explains how the Jewish mystical ideas contained in the Kabbalah are a crucial influence on the theme and style of Fuentes’s novel. Van Delden, Maarten. Carlos Fuentes, México and Modernity. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. Analyzes the ongoing tension in Fuentes’s works between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, which stands in a complex relationship to the problem of Latin American modernization. Williams, Raymond Leslie. The Writings of Carlos Fuentes. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Considering Terra nostra a keystone in Fuentes’s narrative production, the author maintains that the early novels contained all major themes and topics later developed by the writer and, by the same token, that the later novels are reworkings and expansions of many of the motifs found in Fuentes’s masterpiece.

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Ernesto Galarza Mexican American critic and activist Born: Jalcocotán, Mexico; August 15, 1905 Died: San Jose, California; June 22, 1984 nonfiction: The Roman Catholic Church as a Factor in the Political and Social History of Mexico, 1928; Argentina’s Revolution and Its Aftermath, 1931; Debts, Dictatorship, and Revolution in Bolivia and Peru, 1931; La industria eléctrica en México, 1941; Labor in Latin America, 1942; Strangers in Our Fields, 1956; Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story, 1964; Spiders in the House and Workers in the Field, 1970; Barrio Boy: The Story of a Boy’s Acculturation, 1971; Farm Workers and Agri-Business in California, 1947-1960, 1977; Tragedy at Chular: El crucero de las treinta y dos cruces, 1977. poetry: Kodachromes in Rhyme, 1982. children’s literature: Zoo-Risa, 1968 (Zoo-Fun, 1971); Poemas párvulos, 1971; Rimas tontas, 1971; Aquí y allá en California, 1971; Historia verdadera de una gota de miel, 1971; La historia verdadera de una botella de leche, 1972; Un poco de México, 1972; Más poemas párvulos, 1972; Poemas pe-que pe-que peque-ñitos = Very Very Short Nature Poems, 1972; Chogorrom, 1973; Todo mundo lee, 1973.

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he writings of Ernesto Galarza (ehr-NAYS-toh gah-LAHRsah) can be divided into three phases: the Pan-Americanist, the farm laborer advocate, and the educator. Galarza was born in a tiny mountain village in Mexico. When he was five, he, his mother, and two uncles fled the Mexican Revolution. They traveled for three years until they reached Sacramento, California. At the age of twelve, Galarza lost his mother and one uncle to influenza. He continued his education with the assistance of his other uncle and worked after school and during the summers as a farm laborer and in canneries. His flight northward, his fam303

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Barrio Boy Barrio Boy (1971) is an autobiography that divides the author’s life story into five parts, each corresponding roughly to a place in which his family lived. The first part tells of the family’s early history and Galarza’s first five years of life in Jalcocotán, a village high in the Sierra Madre range. The second part details the family’s movements over the next two years, from 1910 to 1912, and the third part describes the family’s travels to the United States. Part 4 brings Galarza’s family to the Mexican American barrio in Sacramento and later to a five-room house on the edge of Sacramento, in the town of Oak Park. With a new bicycle, he delivered newspapers and thought about becoming a doctor or a lawyer, but his middle-class life dissolved when his uncle and mother died from influenza. In the final part, Galarza describes how he and José moved back to the Sacramento barrio. The story ends with the author looking forward to entering high school in the barrio in 1921. The details of each home, village, train car, and street are recorded in the smallest detail. Readers will be fasci-

ily’s struggles for survival, and the process of acculturation are depicted in his 1971 autobiography, Barrio Boy: The Story of a Boy’s Acculturation. This book is perhaps Galarza’s most outstanding contribution to Chicano literature for its pioneering spirit in the field of the essay and the fictionlike quality of its prose. In 1923 Galarza received a scholarship from Occidental College in Los Angeles. In 1927 he received a fellowship from Stanford University, which awarded him a master’s degree in Latin American history and political science in 1929. After marrying Mae Taylor, a teacher from Sacramento, Galarza entered Columbia University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in Latin American history in 1932. 304

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nated by scenes in which Galarza recounts his escape from Jalcocotán, the fighting around Tepic, the stagecoach and train rides through fighting armies, and life in the besieged city of Mazatlán, with cannon fire landing all around his house. Galarza also offers extensive details of life in Sacramento, his family’s move to the suburbs, what it was like to be one of the few Mexican Americans in the new school, and his adolescent thoughts of becoming a doctor or lawyer. Galarza’s narrative is an outward-looking autobiography, sharing little of the author’s inner feelings. Instead it reads like an encyclopedic description of the various places that he lived during these sixteen years. Galarza maintains the narrative stance of a newspaper report, and even the loss of his mother and uncle in the influenza epidemic—forcing his move back to the barrio and crushing his hopes for a profession—is related without emotion. In a way, however, such traumatic events need no emotional description. The story, told through rich experience and objective detail, records the facts of an immigrant boy’s coming-of-age and overcoming of obstacles. The emotions are selfevident. — Jamie Myers

Galarza’s first publications belong to his Pan-American phase. In his book The Roman Catholic Church as a Factor in the Political and Social History of Mexico, Galarza defends the actions of the Mexican revolutionary governments, which aimed to limit the power of the Catholic church. He wrote his other PanAmericanist works, Argentina’s Revolution and Its Aftermath; Debts, Dictatorship, and Revolution in Bolivia and Peru; and Labor in Latin America, while working for the Pan-American Union in Washington, D.C., which later became the Organization of American States. Galarza worked in Washington, D.C., as a research associate in education and as the chief of the Division of Labor and Social Information at the Pan-American Union. He wrote and edited 305

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numerous Inter-American Reports and the Latin America for Young Readers series, published by the Pan-American Union. He became concerned about the living conditions of the braceros, the Mexican contract agricultural laborers who were brought to the United States in 1942 and remained until 1964. His book Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story analyzes the bracero in California agriculture. This book initiates Galarza’s farm labor advocate phase. In 1947 Galarza resigned from the Pan-American Union to serve as the Director of Research and Education in California for the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union, which became the National Farm Labor Union. He became entangled in a union strike against the DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation. The strike gave rise to libel suits and countersuits, which Galarza analyzes in his book Spiders in the House and Workers in the Field. In 1955 he conducted field surveys on the living conditions of Mexican nationals in the United States. This work culminated in his 1956 book Strangers in Our Fields, which produced an uproar among the members of the California State Board of Agriculture, the growers’ associations, and all those who employed Mexican laborers. However, Galarza continued to make public sensitive issues involving agriculture. Farm Workers and Agri-Business in California, 1947-1960 documents the rise of the

There is a folk saying that time heals all wounds but folklore has not said that it wounds all heels. Among these are the ingenious mythmakers who succeed, the true deceivers. They are few in number and the pleasure they aspire to is a secret one. Undetected, from a private place they watch mankind wander in peril and distress, grasping not even at straws but at the shadows of straws. —from Spiders in the House and Workers in the Field

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corporations that precipitated the demise of the small farmer, and Tragedy at Chular examines the safety violations that caused the death of thirty-two laborers. In the mid-1960’s Galarza engaged in the study of learning theories and methodologies for an effective bilingual and bicultural education program. In 1971 he founded the Studio Laboratory for Bilingual Education in San Jose, California, to develop awareness of cultural values, nature, and the creative arts. Out of his concern for the bilingual education of Mexican American children, he produced his Colección Mini-libros, which includes his children’s books. Between 1971 and 1973 he wrote a total of thirteen prose and poetry “mini-libros” (minibooks), each equipped with a bilingual appendix. Galarza’s creativity is also evident in his Kodachromes in Rhyme, which contains poetry for adults and young adults. Galarza is regarded as one of the most prominent Mexican American contributors to American culture. — Cida S. Chase Learn More Bustamante, Jorge. Ernesto Galarza’s Legacy to the History of Labor Migration. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Center for Chicano Research, 1996. Examines Galarza’s role as advocate for Latino immigrants. Díaz Barriga, Miguel. “Vergüenza and Changing Chicano/a Narratives.” In Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America, edited by Matthew C. Gutmann. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. Examines the treatment of shame and its relationship to male identity, patriarchy, and racism in Galarza’s Barrio Boy. Galarza, Ernesto. The Burning Light: Action and Organizing in the Mexican Community in California. Interviews by Gabrielle Norris and Timothy Beard. Berkeley: University of California, 1982. Constitutes a series of interviews of Galarza and his wife conducted in 1977, 1978, and 1981. Gomez, Laura E. From Barrio Boys to College Boys: Ethnic Identity, Ethnic Organizations, and the Mexican American Elite. The Cases 307

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of Ernesto Galarza and Manuel Ruiz, Jr. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Center for Chicano Research, 1989. Explores the transition of key figures in the Mexican American community from immigrant to middle-class status and the resulting shifts in identity formation. Martinez, Manuel Luis. Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Compares the works of Kerouac and other Beat writers with works by Chicano authors. Martinez concludes that the migrant writers, Galarza and Tomás Rivera, expressed a distinctly radical and inclusive vision of democracy in their work. Meister, Dick, and Amme Loftis. A Long Time Coming: The Struggle to Unionize America’s Farm Workers. New York: Macmillan, 1977. Discusses Galarza’s activities as a union leader. Revelle, Keith. “A Collection for La Raza.” Library Journal, November 15, 1971. Points out Galarza’s impact on the Mexican American community.

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Eduardo Galeano Uruguayan historian, critic, and memoirist Born: Montevideo, Uruguay; September 3, 1940 Also known as: Eduardo Hughes Galeano nonfiction: China 1964: Crónica de un desafío, 1964 (politics); Guatemala: País ocupado, 1967 (memoir; Guatemala: Occupied Country, 1969); Reportajes: Tierras de Latinoamérica, otros puntos cardinales, y algo mas, 1967 (travel); La crisis económica, 1969 (politics); Las dagas bajo la capo del imperio, 1969 (politics); Las venas abiertas de América Latina, 1971 (politics; The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, 1973); Siete imágenes de Bolivia, 1971; Crónicas latinoamericanas, 1972 (travel); Días y noches de amor y de guerra, 1978 (memoir; Days and Nights of Love and War, 1983); Uruguai, um campo de concentrapão, 1979 (with Jorge Amado; politics); Nicaragua, nicaraguita, 1979 (politics); Voces de nuestro tiempo, 1981 (memoir); Memoria del fuego I: Los nacimientos, 1982 (history; Memory of Fire I: Genesis, 1985); Memoria del fuego II: Las caras y las máscaras, 1984 (history; Memory of Fire II: Faces and Masks, 1987); Memoria del fuego III: El siglo del viento, 1986 (history; Memory of Fire III: Century of the Wind, 1988); El descubrimiento de América que todavia no fue y otros escritos, 1987 (memoir); Querido Che, 1987 (politics); El tigre azul y otros articulos, 1988 (memoir); El libro de los abrazos, 1989 (The Book of Embraces, 1991); Nosotros decrimos no: Crónicas, 1989 (We Say No: Chronicles, 1963-1991, 1992); Ser como ellos, y otros articulos, 1992; Úselo y tírelo, 1994; Futbol a sol y sombra, 1995 (Soccer in Sun and Shadow, 1998, revised 2003); Patas Arribas, 1998 (Upside Down, 2000); Tejidos, 2001. long fiction: Los días siguientes, 1962; La canción de nosotros, 1975. 309

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short fiction: Los fantasmas del día del león, y otros relatos, 1967; Vagamundo, 1973; Las Palabras andantes, 1993 (Walking Words, 1995). children’s literature: Aventuras de los jóvenes dioses, 1984.

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duardo Galeano (eh-DWAHR-doh gal-ee-AH-noh) is one of the leading socialist critics of South and North America. The son of Eduardo Hughes and Ester (Galeano Muñoz) Roosen, he attended high school in Montevideo and began his career as a socialist spokesman at the age of thirteen. In 1953 he began publishing political cartoons in El sol, a weekly socialist

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paper. By his late teens Galeano’s drawings and articles had become regular features in Marcha, a weekly journal of opinion; in 1961 he was named editor-in-chief. From 1964 to 1966 he served as director of Montevideo’s daily newspaper Época before being appointed editor-in-chief at the University Press of Montevideo, a position he held until 1973. During Galeano’s rapid ascent to influential editorial positions he was also developing his craft of writing in other genres. His career as a journalist provided opportunities for travel and time to write. An early novel, Los días siguientes (the days that follow), and the short stories collected in Los fantasmas del día del león, y otros relatos (the ghosts of the day of the lion, and other stories) demonstrate a lyrical inclination to explore the tensions of myth and history as well as a youthful optimism for Marxist reforms. His nonfiction of the period constituted an informal broadening of his political education as he traveled in China, in Guatemala, and throughout South America. In China 1964: Crónica de un desafío (China 1964: chronicles of contention), his account of travel and interviews with Pu Yi, the last emperor of China, Galeano went far beyond the typical travel story, analyzing the Chinese revision of Soviet Communism and evaluating the Sino-Soviet disputes over doctrine. In Guatemala Galeano criticized the influence of the United States in that country, especially in the wake of the U.S. government’s complicity, through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in the 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz. Developing a blend of discourses that was to become his hallmark in later prose, he devoted several chapters to contemporary Guatemalan history, cited examples of the United States’ collaboration with North American corporations in controlling the economy of Guatemala, reported on his experiences with guerrilla forces, and refuted thoroughly the charges of a Cuban-inspired insurgency. (He found only Cuban exiles working with the CIA to administer prison camps.) The commentary on history and tactics, however, did not preoccupy Galeano; instead, much of the book focused on social, political, and economic ideas as they emerged from discussions with a variety of people. As Galeano’s research in Guatemala and his reflections on other countries in 311

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which he traveled began to assume a further blending of genres, he combined his studies in political history with his previous autobiographical lyricism and political journalism. In a study much like that which he had developed from his time in Guatemala, Galeano expanded his concerns to all South and Central America in The Open Veins of Latin America. By 1973 Galeano had become one of the leading left-wing journalists in South America. When a right-wing military coup overturned the Uruguayan government in that year, Galeano fled across the border into Argentina. Soon after his arrival he founded the magazine Crisis and served as its director until 1976, when a right-wing coup by the military in that country forced Galeano into exile in Spain. Crisis reached a monthly circulation of forty thousand copies, the highest circulation of a Spanish-language cultural publication in history. Although clearly political in its ideology, the journal emphasized art, literature, and popular culture. A second novel, La canción de nosotros (our song), won for him the Premio Casa de las Américas in 1975. His experience with the relatively rapid rise of two military dictatorships led to a fragmented lifestyle, but Galeano seemed determined to transform individual turmoil into collective hope. Living in exile in Spain, Galeano began reexamining his life. Now in a third marriage in a third country, he reflected on his personal and political activities, publishing in 1978, Days and Nights of Love and War, for which he won the Premio Casa de las Américas a second time. Focusing on the twin themes of the power of fear to silence a nation and the greed that motivated the quest for power, Galeano created a verbal collage of memoirs, facts, speeches, political ideas, fictions, and interviews that was to complete his growth as an innovative stylist. Fragmented in textual construction as life in that era was constantly disoriented, the triumph of Days and Nights of Love and War was to grant each character’s voice and experience equal stature among the rest, thereby creating an ethic of hope and a vision for a democratic, socialist future in Latin America. While still exiled in Spain, Galeano built upon the aesthetic developed in Days and Nights of Love and War and initiated a mas312

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The vice president of the United States, John Calhoun, believes that God created blacks to cut wood, pick cotton, and carry water for the chosen people. Textile factories demand more cotton and cotton demands more land and more blacks. There are powerful reasons, said Calhoun last year, for Texas to form part of the United States. At that time President Jackson, who breathes frontiers with an athlete’s lungs, had already sent his friend Sam Houston to Texas. —from Memory of Fire

sive, ten-year research project intended to unmask the colonial historians’ views of the New World. Searching through thousands of documents, he began his “subjective” three-volume history, Memory of Fire. Using a refined, spare method of collage, brief vignettes, shifting voices, and multiple points of view but keeping a strict chronological record, Galeano’s first volume, Genesis, established a symphonic structure in which themes could emerge, wane, and then surface again. Although the anecdotal entries were pared to discrete prose poems in their tone, they created an immediacy that accentuated the intensity of events from the origin myths of native peoples to the contemporary political struggles documented in the third volume. The entries, however, were keyed carefully to sources listed in the back of each volume. Consequently, the history emerged much like a well-documented, realistic novel: personal but mythic in its range. Memory of Fire was to be one of the very few examples of a postmodernist epic. As Memory of Fire proceeded through the second volume, Faces and Masks, and the third, Century of the Wind, Galeano’s enormous project became a unified history of the Western hemisphere that included the experience of Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans as well as that of many native North American peoples. 313

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It traced the arrival and integration of the French, British, Spaniards, and Africans and followed the subsequent interactions of generations of descendants into the twentieth century tensions between the United States and Latin America. Although he is known primarily for his historical and political writings, Galeano, through Memory of Fire, became associated

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Memory of Fire In Century of the Wind (1986), the third volume of the Memory of Fire trilogy, Galeano follows the method he established in the trilogy’s first two volumes: Genesis (1982), which begins with pre-Columbian creation myths and concludes in 1700, and Faces and Masks (1984), which spans the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each book consists of a series of brief entries ranging in length from a few lines to a page (the average is about a third of a page). Each entry begins with a date, a place, and a title; thus, the first entry in Century of the Wind, “1900: San Jose de Gracia/The World Goes On,” tells how the people of a village in central Mexico prepared for the end of the world, which they expected to coincide with the end of the century. The focus is on Latin America, though sometimes the scene shifts to North America or—rarely—to another continent. Each volume concludes with an extensive numbered list of sources, to which the entries are referenced. What emerges from this collage is an alternative history—valuable reading for North Americans, since it provides a fresh slant on familiar events. Galeano writes as a partisan of the oppressed—he was exiled from Uruguay for many years (Century of the Wind concludes in 1984, when he returned to Uruguay) and few readers will finish his trilogy unmoved. At least some, however, while sharing his outrage at the complicity of the United States in the horrors of Latin American history, will weary of Galeano’s unrelenting leftist bias.

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with the Magical Realism of South American writers in the 1980’s. The easing of political restrictions in Uruguay, which permitted Galeano’s return to the country in 1984, and the critical attention devoted to Latin American writers by the world’s reviewers and writers have brought Galeano a growing readership, if primarily in translated works. Some critics have found him excessive in his critique of capitalism and in his propensity for violent images, but many have also granted that the violence is a genuinely accurate portrayal of life under colonial rule and military dictatorships and that his focus on the dynamic of fear and greed in those governments surpasses doctrinaire ideological analysis. Galeano’s insistence on freedom of expression and human rights, coupled with his rejection of totalitarian methods by either right-wing or left-wing politicians, underscores the universal value of individual human dignity. Literature, for Galeano, is truth and hope. — Michael Loudon

Learn More Allende, Isabel. “Breath of Hope: On the Writings of Eduardo Galeano.” Monthly Review 48 (April, 1997): 1-6. A profile and appreciation written by another well-known Latin American writer. Bell, Virginia E. “Counter-chronicling and Alternative Mapping in Memoria del fuego and Almanac of the Dead.” MELUS 25 (Fall, 2000): 5-30. Considers how Galeano plays with the dividing line between fiction and history in his work. Fischlin, Daniel, and Martha Nandorfy. Eduardo Galeano: Through the Looking Glass. Montreal, Que.: Black Rose Books, 2002. A political and literary biography. Nandorfy, Martha J. “Two Radical Storytellers for the Young (and) Old.” In Latin American Narratives and Cultural Identity: Selected Readings, edited by Irene Maria F. Blayer and Mark Cronlund Anderson. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Analyzes Galeano’s work and compares it to the radical writings of Zapatista rebel Subcomandante Marcos. 315

Rómulo Gallegos Venezuelan novelist Born: Caracas, Venezuela; August 2, 1884 Died: Caracas, Venezuela; April 4, 1969 long fiction: El último Solar, 1920 (better known as Reinaldo Solar); Doña Bárbara, 1929 (English translation, 1931); Cantaclaro, 1934; Canaima, 1935 (English translation, 1984); Pobre negro, 1937; El forastero, 1942; Sobre la misma tierra, 1943; La brizna de paja en el viento, 1952; Tierra bajo los pies, 1971. short fiction: La rebelión y otros cuentos, 1946; Cuentos completos, 1981. miscellaneous: La doncella y El último patriota, 1957 (play and short stories).

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fter graduating from law school in Caracas, Venezuela, where he was born in 1884, Rómulo Gallegos (ROH-mewloh gahl-YAY-gohs) became a teacher in 1912. He founded a magazine and wrote unsuccessful dramas and short stories until dictator Juan Gómez suspended the magazine. His first novel,

Felipe stood up and fixed her with a penetrating look of fury that upset her. He had understood her intention: if he went to reach for the piece of cassava, the bushes would give under his weight and he would crash down into the ravine. There was an instant that lasted an eternity. Plácida felt that madness was whirling all around her. Felipe, with sudden resolve, took a step toward the bushes. —from “Peace on High”

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Reinaldo Solar, attacked crooked politics. Not until the publication in Spain of Doña Bárbara in 1929 did Gallegos achieve an international reputation. Doña Bárbara is one of the masterpieces of what has been called the “novel of the land.” Mystique of the land, naturalistic confrontation of man and nature, melodramatic story line, more or less careful literary elaboration, social critique, and strong didactic purpose characterize this genre. Set against the vast Venezuelan plains, the story presents an allegorical conflict between civilization and barbarism. Progress and modernization are represented by the enlightened Santos Luzardo (he has “sainthood” and “light” in his name), who returns to his lands and has to overcome wilderness, backwardness, and violence, represented by Doña Bárbara. The conflict is solved through a family romance: Luzardo marries Doña Bárbara’s daughter Marisela. The novel has gone through many editions and has been made into a film. While in voluntary political exile in Spain, Gallegos wrote Cantaclaro, the story of a wandering minstrel. Some critics consider it his greatest novel; others call it overly complicated and somewhat unformed. Canaima showcases the overwhelming power of nature vis-á-vis human beings. The protagonist, Marcos Vargas, leaves for the jungle to lead a more fulfilling primitive life, but he falls prey to the malignant god (Canaima) of that environment. At the end, Marcos Vargas sends his son to Caracas to bring back the light of the civilization. The novel revisits the conflict of Doña Bárbara, but without its clear-cut allegorical didacticism. Following the dictator’s death in 1935, Gallegos returned to Venezuela and wrote Pobre negro (poor black). This novel, published in 1937, deals with a nineteenth century Venezuelan slave. An indigenous girl, educated in New York to work for the advancement of her race, is the heroine of Sobre la misma tierra (on the same land), published in 1943. Gallegos did more than write about politics: He also campaigned twice for the presidency of Venezuela. In 1947 he was elected to serve until 1952, but he was overthrown by a military junta in 1948. An exile in Cuba, he wrote and published there in 1952 a work titled La brizna de paja en el viento (straws in the 318

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Doña Bárbara Doña Bárbara (1929) is a novel of the llano—the vast treeless, grassy plains of Venezuela. The protagonist, Santos Luzardo (whose name evokes the Spanish words for “saint” and “light”), battles both man and nature in this classic tale of civilization versus barbarism. The novel’s namesake, Doña Bárbara, is a beautiful but unscrupulous mestiza, once wronged by a white man and now taking her revenge on all men. She was for a time the mistress of Lorenzo Barquero, heir to half the Altamira ranch, and had a daughter by him named Marisela. Then she ran him off his land and took possession. With the help of her cowboys, she is acquiring the rest of the ranch by moving the boundary fences and stealing the cattle. Unfortunately, she falls in love with Santos Luzardo, heir to the other half of the estate, who sees how it has deteriorated under its irresponsible managers and is determined to restore the ranch to productivity. To end the long feud between the Luzardos and the Barqueros, he brings the dying Lorenzo Barquero and Marisela from their swamp cabin to live at the Altamira ranch house. From his knowledge of law, he is able to force the magistrate to call for a round-up to separate the cattle. He also sends some of his cowboys to collect heron feathers, from whose sale he will get money to repair his fences. They are murdered and the feathers stolen. When the local magistrate does nothing, Santos decides to follow the law of the jungle and match violence with violence. Hunting the feathers, on a tip from Bárbara, he finds the Wizard, her most trusted henchman, and leaves him dead. Doña Bárbara’s followers having deserted her, she rides to Altamira to shoot her daughter, whom she considers to be her rival. However, she softens at the sight of Santos’s display of affection for Marisela. She draws up papers leaving the Barquero land to Marisela and restoring what she has been stealing, then rides off, never to be heard of again. 319

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wind), a study of political unrest. In all his writing, this novelist, who ranks close to the top among authors of his continent, showed himself an ardent moralist with deep faith in nonviolence and in the ethics of Christianity. — Emil Volek Learn More Alonso, Carlos J. The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Studies Gallegos within the panorama of regionalism. Magnarelli, Sharon. “Woman and Nature in Doña Bárbara by Rómulo Gallegos.” Revista de estudios hispánicos 19 (May, 1985). Various aspects of Gallegos’s key novel are studied. Marcone, Jorge. “Jungle Fever: Primitivism in Environmentalism: Rómulo Gallegos’s Canaima and the Romance of the Jungle.” In Primitivism and Identity in Latin America: Essays on Art, Literature, and Culture, edited by Erik Camayd-Freixas and José Eduardo González. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000. Examines the treatment of the jungle and the character of Marcos Vargas in Canaima. Pennington, Eric. “Beyond Realism and Allegory: Myth and Psyche in Doña Bárbara.” Crítica hispánica 9, nos. 1/2 (1987). A psychological reading of Gallegos’s novel revealing its mythic force. Rodríguez-Alcalá, Hector, ed. Nine Essays on Rómulo Gallegos. Riverside, Calif.: Latin American Studies Program, University of California, 1979. Provides addresses, essays, and lectures relating to Gallegos and his literary works. Rosegreen-Williams, Claudette. “Rómulo Gallegos’s Doña Bárbara: Toward a Radical Rereading.” Symposium 46, no. 4 (1993). Challenges the traditional reading of Gallegos’s novel’s ideology and nationalism.

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Notable Latino Writers Volume 2 Griselda Gambaro — Sheila Ortiz Taylor

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Table of Contents Key to Pronunciation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxi Complete List of Articles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxiii Griselda Gambaro . . . . . Cristina García . . . . . . . Lionel G. García . . . . . . Gabriel García Márquez . . Enrique González Martínez Nicolás Guillén . . . . . . . João Guimarães Rosa . . . . Ricardo Güiraldes . . . . . Martín Luis Guzmán . . . .

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xxxi

Complete List of Articles Volume 1 Demetrio Aguilera Malta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Isidora Aguirre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Ciro Alegría . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Claribel Alegría . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Isabel Allende . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Ignacio Manuel Altamirano . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Julia Alvarez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Jorge Amado . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Rudolfo A. Anaya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Mário de Andrade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Reinaldo Arenas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Roberto Arlt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Juan José Arreola . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Miguel Ángel Asturias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Mariano Azuela . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Jimmy Santiago Baca . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Raymond Barrio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Eduardo Barrios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Adolfo Bioy Casares . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 María Luisa Bombal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 Jorge Luis Borges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Ignácio de Loyola Brandão . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Aristeo Brito . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Julia de Burgos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 Guillermo Cabrera Infante . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 Ernesto Cardenal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Alejo Carpentier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 Alejandro Casona. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 Carlos Castaneda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Ana Castillo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Lorna Dee Cervantes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Denise Chávez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Sandra Cisneros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200 xxxiii



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José Lezama Lima . . . . . . . . Osman Lins . . . . . . . . . . . . José Lins do Rego . . . . . . . . Clarice Lispector . . . . . . . . . Eduardo Machado . . . . . . . . Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis Eduardo Mallea. . . . . . . . . . José Julián Martí . . . . . . . . . Gabriela Mistral. . . . . . . . . . Nicholasa Mohr. . . . . . . . . . Alejandro Morales . . . . . . . . Pablo Neruda . . . . . . . . . . . Juan Carlos Onetti . . . . . . . . Judith Ortiz Cofer . . . . . . . . Nicanor Parra. . . . . . . . . . . Octavio Paz . . . . . . . . . . . . Miguel Piñero . . . . . . . . . . Mary Helen Ponce . . . . . . . . Elena Poniatowska . . . . . . . . Manuel Puig . . . . . . . . . . . Rachel de Queiroz . . . . . . . . Horacio Quiroga . . . . . . . . . John Rechy . . . . . . . . . . . . Alfonso Reyes . . . . . . . . . . . Alberto Ríos. . . . . . . . . . . . Tomás Rivera . . . . . . . . . . . Augusto Roa Bastos. . . . . . . . Abraham Rodriguez, Jr. . . . . . Richard Rodriguez . . . . . . . . José Rubén Romero . . . . . . . Juan Ruiz de Alarcón. . . . . . . Juan Rulfo . . . . . . . . . . . . Ernesto Sábato . . . . . . . . . . Gustavo Sainz . . . . . . . . . . . Florencio Sánchez . . . . . . . . Luis Rafael Sánchez . . . . . . . Thomas Sanchez . . . . . . . . . Severo Sarduy. . . . . . . . . . . xxxv

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Volume 3 Piri Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rodolfo Usigli . . . . . . . . . . . Luis Miguel Valdez . . . . . . . . . Luisa Valenzuela . . . . . . . . . . César Vallejo . . . . . . . . . . . . Mario Vargas Llosa . . . . . . . . . Maruxa Vilalta . . . . . . . . . . . José Antonio Villarreal . . . . . . . Victor Villaseñor . . . . . . . . . . Helena María Viramontes . . . . . Hugo Wast . . . . . . . . . . . . . Agustín Yáñez. . . . . . . . . . . . Jose Yglesias . . . . . . . . . . . . . Essays Latino and Latin American Drama Latino Long Fiction . . . . . . . . Latin American Long Fiction . . . Latino Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . Latin American Poetry . . . . . . . Latino Short Fiction . . . . . . . . Latin American Short Fiction . . . Appendices More Latino Authors . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . Electronic Resources . . . . . . . . Chronological List of Authors . . . Indexes Genre Index . . . . . . . . . . . . Geographical Index . . . . . . . . Personages Index. . . . . . . . . . Title Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxvi

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Griselda Gambaro Argentine playwright Born: Buenos Aires, Argentina; July 28, 1928 drama: Las paredes, pr. 1964, pb. 1979 (English translation, 1992); El desatino, pr., pb. 1965; Matrimonio, pr. 1965; Los siameses, pr., pb. 1967 (The Siamese Twins, 1967); El campo, pb. 1967, pr. 1968 (The Camp, 1970); Información para extranjeros, wr. 1971, pb. 1987 (Information for Foreigners, 1992); Nada que ver, pr. 1972, pb. 1983; Solo un aspecto, pb. 1973, pr. 1974; Sucede lo que pasa, pr. 1976, pb. 1983; Decir sí, pb. 1978, pr. 1981; El despojamiento, pr., pb. 1981; La malasangre, pr. 1982, pb. 1984 (Bad Blood, 1994); Real envido, pr. 1983, pb. 1984; Del sol naciente, pr., pb. 1984; Teatro, pb. 1984-1996 (6 volumes). long fiction: Una felicidad con menos pena, 1967; Nada que ver con otra historia, 1972; Ganarse la muerte, 1976; Dios no nos quiere contentos, 1979; Lo impenetrable, 1984 (The Impenetrable Madame X, 1991); Déspues del día de fiesta, 1994; El mar que nos trajo, 2001. short fiction: Madrigal en ciudad, 1963; El desatino, 1965; Lo mejor que se tiene, 1998. nonfiction: Escritos inocentes, 1999. miscellaneous: Conversaciónes con chicos, 1966.

G

riselda Gambaro (grih-ZEHL-dah gahm-BAH-roh) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has spent her life there, aside from a year in Rome in 1970 and almost three years in Barcelona (1977-1980). She is the daughter of a postal worker, and because she came from a family with limited economic means, after she finished high school in 1943 she went to work in the business office of a publishing company. Through her writing and its successes, she has enjoyed greater financial security. She is married to the sculptor Juan Carlos Distefano and is the mother of two children, Andrea, born in 1961, and Lucas, born in 1965. Many of the critics who meet Gambaro in Argentina or during one of her trips abroad are struck by her 321

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Madam X, the last descendant of an aristocratic family, usually received mail early in the morning. If her mute intuition had found words to express itself, Madam X’s life would have taken a different turn, perhaps less involved in overwhelming passions but filled with greater pleasure on a daily basis. A woman of neither profound reflections nor speculation, her slumbering intuition didn’t prevent her from wondering who sent the huge envelope made of elegant paper. —from The Impenetrable Madam X (trans. Evelyn Picon Garfield)

gentle manner and gracious demeanor, which belie the brutality, vigor, and cruelty expressed in her texts. Although she once called herself “a cowardly person,” any reader or spectator of her work soon realizes that the texts also disprove this evaluation, for the writer of these plays must be brave indeed to face the types of bleak and cruel situations that are portrayed. The expectation is implied, however, that the works will bring forth the kind of participation needed to correct the real problems of today’s sociopolitical environment. According to her recollections, she was always writing; that is, from the moment she learned to read she also began to write. She threw away many pieces of work until she was sufficiently satisfied to offer as her first effort worthy of publishing Madrigal en ciudad, a collection of three short novellas that won the Prize of the Argentine Fondo Nacional de las Artes for narrative in 1963. Soon after, she received the Premio Emece in 1965 for the collection El desatino, also containing novellas and short stories. At the same time, two plays emerged from the prose pieces, Las paredes and El desatino, each winning theatrical prizes: for Las paredes, the Premio de la Asociacion de Teatros and the Fondo Nacional de las Artes in 1964, and for El desatino, the Prize of the Revista Teatro XX in 1965. 322

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One of the characteristics of Gambaro’s writing production that emerged from the beginning was her development of some of the prose pieces as dramatic works almost at the same time that she was writing the prose pieces. She continued this practice until 1972, the year in which she completed work on the novel Nada que ver con otra historia and the play Nada que ver. She no longer works in that almost parallel fashion in the two genres, finding that she now writes either a play or a piece of fiction independent of one or the other; the plays, however, have become more famous than her fiction and have been translated into several languages and staged around the world. In Argentina, she was closely associated with the experimental art group located at the Centro de Experimentación audiovisual del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, a foundation formed in 1958 to patronize the fine arts and foster sociological investigations. The Institute, which closed in 1971, worked in part as a theatrical laboratory for young writers who were able to experiment with techniques and representation by adapting audiovisual phenomena to the stage. As part of its promotion of vanguardist and creative talents, the Institute published as well as produced a number of her plays. Jorge Petraglia, a noted Argentine director and actor, has also been associated with Gambaro’s work in both of his talented capacities. As a woman who writes in Latin America, Gambaro is often asked about her role as a woman writer, with questions ranging from the problematics of a feminine discourse to extraliterary problems concerning whether she has faced discrimination in her career because of gender. Her response is usually to present her own specific experiences rather than offer observations applicable to women in Latin America. Argentina, for example, has a long tradition of women writers, and there are many wellestablished women in literary circles. She sees any difficulties as related more to social class than to gender; all the successful women in Argentina have been from the upper class and appear to act with an inborn sense of security absent in a person from the lower classes. In regard to feminine discourse, she was asked to present a paper on the question, “¿Es posible y deseable una dramaturgia especificamente femenina?” (1980; is it possible or desirable to have a specifically feminine dramaturgy?), and her 323

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W H A T

T O

R E A D

The Siamese Twins The contrast between words and actions typical of Gambaro’s dramatic images is graphically demonstrated in The Siamese Twins (1967). The play develops as a series of encounters in which Lorenzo, the dominant member of the pair alluded to in the title, is driven by envy to cause the destruction of Ignacio. This relationship recreates the Cain and Abel motif, yet the play never makes explicit that the two are blood brothers; their fraternal relationship seems to be a myth exploited by Lorenzo or, if true, a fact not willingly accepted by Ignacio. Lorenzo’s attempt at domination is dramatically expressed in the scene in which he forces Ignacio to walk with him as if the two were real Siamese twins, attached physically. This theatrical gesture contradicts the verbal messages that indicate that the two are physically separate and psychologically different. Lorenzo is cunning, envious, and treacherous while Ignacio is ingenuous, compassionate, and good-natured. Lorenzo’s need to rid himself of Ignacio is predicated on the erroneous belief that without Ignacio he will somehow be more whole, more independent. By the end of the play, Lorenzo has finally succeeded in implicating Ignacio in some deed for which the police torture and kill him. In the final scene, Lorenzo realizes too late that his destruction of Ignacio has left him not whole but deficient. The impact of the final scene is strengthened by its power to recall the final moments of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1954). Lorenzo is alone on an empty stage, ironically assuming the identity of Ignacio by recreating the latter’s fetal position as a dead man. Like Estragon’s famous Allons (“Let’s go”), which brings no action, Lorenzo, too, announces his imminent departure but goes nowhere. His inability to act contradicts his words and his very existence; the completion of his goal has brought his own destruction. — Sandra Messinger Cypess

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answer is that one writes naturally, without thinking of gender, and the result is the particular view of the writer, showing his or her particular characteristics. The women characters in her own work fit no particular pattern and seem to reflect the greater division Gambaro has perceived in human behavior: Some people are victims of the oppressive acts of others, but at any one moment, anyone can become a victim. Of the many successful Argentine dramatists, Gambaro is consistently named among the top playwrights of her country and of Latin America in general. Despite working within a confined sociopolitical context, she has been successful in creating a theatrical experience that relates to the particular problems of her country yet is couched in a universal theatrical idiom. She won the Argentores Prize from the Society of Argentinian Authors first in 1968 for The Camp and in 1976 for Sucede lo que pasa. The Camp also earned her awards from the Municipality of Buenos Aires, Talia magazine, and “Theatrical Broadcast News” of Municipal Radio of Buenos Aires. In 1982 she was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship. Because her view of the human condition transcends national boundaries and her plays are richly textured in terms of theme and technique, Gambaro’s work has been the focus of an increasing number of articles and dissertations in the United States, Canada, and Europe. In general, her work may be characterized as having a contemporary sociopolitical message that is conveyed with intense visual images of compelling dramatic interest that work well onstage. — Sandra Messinger Cypess Learn More Boling, Becky. “Reenacting Politics: The Theater of Griselda Gambaro.” In Latin American Women Dramatists: Theater, Texts, and Theories, edited by Catherine Larson and Margarita Vargas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Analyzes the treatment of political power, justice, and morality in Gambaro’s plays. Gladhart, Amalia. Leper in Blue: Coercive Performance and the Contemporary Latin American Theater. Chapel Hill: University of 325

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North Carolina Press, 2000. Gambaro’s work is among the plays that are analyzed in this examination of works by Latin American playwrights. Jehenson, Myriam Yvonne. “Staging Cultural Violence: Griselda Gambaro and Argentina’s ‘Dirty War.’” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 32, no. 1 (March, 1999): 85-104. Examines Gambaro’s play Information for Foreigners and its link between politics and art, drawing parallels to the mechanisms of Argentina’s repressive regime in the 1970’s. López-Calvo, Ignacio. “Lesbianism and Caricature in Griselda Gambaro’s Lo impenetrable.” In Latina Lesbian Writers and Artists, edited by Maria Dolores Costa. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2003. One of eight essays examining works by Latina lesbians. Magnarelli, Sharon. “Acting/Seeing Women: Griselda Gambaro’s El despojamiento.” In Latin American Women’s Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis, edited by Anny Brooksbank Jones and Catherine Davies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Focuses on Gambaro’s use of the theatrical element as a thematic thread in El despojamiento, itself an allegory for Argentina’s military regime. Reinelt, Janice, ed. Crucibles of Crisis: Performing Social Change. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Essay by Diane Taylor uses Information for Foreigners to explore the intersection of theater and terror, examining especially the theater’s ability to prevent or conceal violence. Taylor, Claire. Bodies and Texts: Configurations of Identity in the Works of Griselda Gambaro, Albalucía Angel, and Laura Esquivel. Leeds, England: Maney, 2003. Analyzes the formation of feminine identity in Nada que ver con otra historia and Dios no nos quiere contentos. Witte, Ann. Guiding the Plot: Politics and Feminism in the Work of Women Playwrights from Spain and Argentina. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Focuses on the theater in Argentina and Spain between 1960 to 1990, a period of important sociopolitical change in both countries. Examines the way in which playwrights can provide an oppositional stance to those in power and work within the confines of an oppressive environment. 326

Cristina García Cuban American novelist Born: Havana, Cuba; July 4, 1958 long fiction: Dreaming in Cuban, 1992; The Agüero Sisters, 1997; Monkey Hunting, 2003. nonfiction: Cars of Cuba, 1995. edited text: Cubanisimo! The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature, 2003.

C

ristina García (krihs-TEE-nah gahr-SEE-ah) is a highly regarded Cuban American writer. Born in Havana, Cuba, she was brought to the United States at the age of two, when her family emigrated after Fidel Castro came to power. She grew up in New York City, studied in Catholic schools, and attended Barnard College and the School of Advanced International Studies at The Johns Hopkins University. In 1993, after working for Time magazine as a journalist in Miami, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, García was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. She then moved to Los Angeles. As a young adult García read American, Russian, and French novelists. Later she discovered her Latin American literary heritage. She cites Wallace Stevens, Gabriel García Márquez, and Toni Morrison as particular literary inspirations for her when writing her novels. Perhaps her greatest inspiration, however, was a trip back to Cuba in 1984, where she learned about her family and, as for so many bicultural writers, regained a sense of her own culture of origin and her part in it from the experience of “going home.” As a bicultural Cuban American writer, García is part of a vibrant group of individuals of various ethnicities who draw on the contradictions of being simultaneously both and neither. Other American writers sharing this multiethnic common ground are Julia Alvarez, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, 327

Cristina García

Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Diana Abu-Jaber, Oscar Hijuelos, Pablo Medina, and Omar Torres. They too write of the delicate balance, double consciousness, and multiple resonances of living “on the borderlands,” as Anzaldúa phrased it. They share an ability to “pass,” as well as the knowledge, sometimes painful yet often a source of great pride, of their difference from mainstream American culture. They chronicle intergenerational immigrant experience and displacement, exile and double exile, for even the culture of origin feels like a strange place to the hybrid child who, unlike its parents, has become at least partially

Norma I. Quintana

328

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In Cuba, aging was not such a disgraceful affair. Most elderly women were venerated and sought after for counsel. They were surrounded by their families and often lived to see their great-grandchildren grow up. The abuelitas were the eyes and ears of a clan, the peacemakers, the storytellers and historians. They held each young destiny in their hands. —from The Agüero Sisters

identified with the adopted American culture. The formation of identity, in all its complex manifestations, is the overarching theme in this kind of work. The relativity of perception is another powerful theme in the works of these writers, and García is particularly skillful in the way her narrative structure and chronology reflect this relativity. Given the element of the autobiographical in novels that explore identity formation, it is no surprise that García has experienced this relativity personally, not only culturally but also politically. When interviewed by Allan Vorda in 1993 García mentioned that her parents were extremely anti-Communist, but that her other relatives, whom she had met on her 1984 trip, were pro-Communist if not Party members. Dreaming in Cuban is set alternately in Brooklyn and Havana, with multiple narrators tracing their memories, their family lines, and their complex interconnections. Granddaughter Pilar and grandmother Celia communicate wordlessly over the years, and only when the grandchild comes to visit do both feel complete again. In her novel García plays with Magical Realism, politics, the diary and epistolary forms, and the accretion of layers of culture. The locations shift, just as do the barriers of time and space, life and death, and García draws on the puzzle that is memory to show how identity is formed. The novel was nominated for the National Book Award in 1992, and in 1994 García received a Guggenheim Fellowship. 329

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Dreaming in Cuban Dreaming in Cuban (1992), Cristina García’s first novel, chronicles the lives of three generations of women as they strive for self-fulfillment. This bittersweet novel also illustrates the Cuban American immigrant experience in the United States, focusing on the search for cultural identity in exile. In Cuba, for twenty-five years, the matriarch Celia del Pino writes letters to Gustavo, a long lost lover. She never sends the self-revealing correspondence, and stops writing in 1959, at the time of the Cuban Revolution, when the family becomes divided by politics and her granddaughter Pilar is born. Celia, who believes that “to survive is an act of hope,” sublimates her unfulfilled romantic desires by imagining herself as a heroine of the revolution. In need of recognition, she supports Fidel Castro devotedly. As her husband Jorge del Pino leaves her to join their daughter Lourdes in the United States, she spends her days scanning the sea for American invaders and daydreaming about a more exciting life. Felicia, Celia’s youngest daughter, abused and abandoned by her first husband, Hugo Villaverde, suffers

The Agüero Sisters draws upon the pro- and anti-Communist allegiances found in García’s own family. The novel contrasts two sisters, Constancia, who fled Cuba when Castro came to power, and Reina, who remained. Each has achieved a different kind of success in her chosen environment. Like Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters is strongly marked by Magical Realism. Monkey Hunting is also about Cuban Americans, but this time Chinese Cuban Americans, tracing the Chen family from 1857 to the present as they emigrate from country to country. — Tanya Gardiner-Scott 330

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from fits of madness and violence. A stranger to herself and her children, she seeks refuge in music and the AfroCuban cult of Santeria; after becoming a priestess, she finds peace in death. Lourdes, Celia’s eldest daughter, is raped and tortured by the revolutionaries and loses her unborn son. She escapes from Castro’s Cuba with her husband Rufino del Puente and their daughter Pilar. Emotionally unfulfilled, she develops eating disorders; while her family dreams of returning to Cuba, she supports the anti-Castro movement, establishes a chain of Yankee Doodle bakeries, and focuses on achieving the American Dream. Raised in Brooklyn, in conflict with her Americanized mother, Pilar identifies with her grandmother Celia in Cuba. She visits the homeland in search of her true identity and, as she receives Celia’s legacy of letters and family stories, she becomes aware of the magic inner voice that inspires artistic creativity. Pilar returns to America with a positive self-image, accepting her double identity as a bilingual and bicultural Latina. Dreaming in Cuban represents the coming-of-age memoir narrative. Through recollections and nostalgic remembrances, the novel illustrates issues of identity and separation, women’s survival strategies, and cultural dualism. — Ludmila Kapschutschenko-Schmitt

Learn More Alvarez-Borland, Isabel. “Displacements and Autobiography in Cuban-American Fiction.” In Twayne Companion to Contemporary World Literature: From the Editors of Literature Today, edited by Pamela A. Genova. New York: Twayne/Thomson Gale, 2003. Compares García with two other Cuban American writers, Omar Torres and Pablo Medina, and looks at the semiautobiographical nature of their novels. Brogan, Kathleen. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. Brogan analyzes García’s Dreaming in Cuban and 331

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work by Toni Morrison and Louise Erdich to examine how minority writers use modern ghost stories as a means of exploring and recreating their ethnic identity. Davis, Rocio G. “Back to the Future: Mothers, Languages, and Homes in Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban.” In Twayne Companion to Contemporary World Literature: From the Editors of Literature Today, edited by Pamela A. Genova. New York: Twayne/Thomson Gale, 2003. Explores the complicated negotiations of mother-daughter bonds in García’s novel. McCracken, Ellen. New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999. García’s work is included in this analysis of writing by Cuban American, Puerto Rican American, Mexican American, and Dominican American writers. McCracken explains how these writers have redefined concepts of multiculturalism and diversity in American society. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Sets García’s work in the context of the popular culture created by Cuban Americans who moved to the United States when they were children. Viera, Joseph M., and Deborah Kay Ferrell. “Cristina García, 1958” In American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, edited by Jay Parini. Supplement XI: Toni Cade Bambara to Richard Yates. New York: Scribner’s, 2002. Includes an essay discussing García’s life and work, and a bibliography. Yagoda, Ben. The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing. New York: HarperResource, 2004. Yagoda seeks to define literary style and to learn how a writer develops his or her own unique voice. He interviews García and other writers who explain how they approach style and how their style has been influenced by other writers.

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Lionel G. García Mexican American novelist and short-story writer Born: San Diego, Texas; August 20, 1935 long fiction: Leaving Home, 1985; A Shroud in the Family, 1987; Hardscrub, 1990; To a Widow with Children, 1994. short fiction: I Can Hear the Cowbells Ring, 1994; The Day They Took My Uncle, and Other Stories, 2001. drama: An Acorn on the Moon, pr. 1995. children’s/young adult literature: The Elephant and the Ant, 2000.

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orn in 1935 in the remote brush country of Texas near the Mexican border to Gonzalo Guzman and Maria Saenz García, Lionel G. García (LIOH-nehl gahr-SEE-ah) was later to write fiction for nearly three decades before seeing significant publication of and attention to his works. A regional writer, García has lived most of his life in this desolate, drought-ridden part of the United States. Interested in science and biology, García entered Texas A&M University. He earned a B.S. in 1956; he also took classes in and otherwise pursued creative writing as an undergraduate. García

He was an alcoholic. Which brings me to the supposed cause of his bedevilment. He had been possessed, my grandmother told us, when he accidentally drank the dregs of a bottle of beer that had been laced with a special potion, a potion so powerful it would cause insanity. It was, she said, a potion meant for someone else. —from “The Day They Took My Uncle” 333

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twice served two-year terms in the U.S. Army, the first of which was in 1957-1958. A year after leaving the military, he married Noemi Barrera. He returned to active duty in 1959. Resolved not to pursue a military career, he returned to Texas A&M in the early 1960’s, where he eventually earned the D.V.M. degree, which would provide most of his life’s work outside the literary world. He became a practicing veterinarian in the late 1960’s, after spending three years as an assistant professor of anatomy, again at Texas A&M. Perhaps surprisingly, though, he makes little use of his biology and primary profession in his fiction.

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While serving in the military and teaching college classes, García’s side interest—perhaps at heart it was always his main one—was writing short stories. He had published his first story in the undergraduate literary magazine during his senior year of college, continuing to write thereafter. It was not until 1983, however, that he would receive recognition for his work; he was awarded the PEN Southwest Discovery Prize for his first novel, Leaving Home, which at the time was unpublished. Like the terrain in South Texas, García’s characters—while colorful—are often bleak and desolate in their attitudes and behavior. Both Leaving Home and A Shroud in the Family are about family life among first- and second-generation immigrants coming from Mexico to Texas. About this time, he also began to give public readings of his fiction, a mode of performance that well serves his storytelling abilities. His next novel, Hardscrub, is set in the 1950’s and also tells of a family confronting the problems of everyday life in South Texas. It won several honors, all regional in nature, including the Texas Literary Award. In the mid-1990’s García changed his focus to other subgenres of fiction: He published the highly autobiographical collection of personal writings titled I Can Hear the Cowbells Ring, and he tried his luck with a play called An Acorn on the Moon, which was locally produced but never published. He also wrote a children’s book, The Elephant and the Ant. In the late 1990’s he collected his stories, most of which had been previously published, in The Day They Took My Uncle, and Other Stories. García’s works have generally been well received as popular fiction, regional in scope but more than expansive in their appreciation of the experience of Mexican immigrants coming to make lives in the southwestern United States. — Carl Singleton Learn More Anhalt, Diana. “South Texas Buckshot Stories.” The Texas Observer, November 9, 2001. A detailed, favorable review of The Day They Took My Uncle, and Other Stories. Anhalt focuses on local-color characters appearing in the collection of short fiction. 335

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Leaving Home Lionel G. García’s Leaving Home (1985) offers an intimate view of one Latino family in the early 1940’s. The novel traces the wanderings of the aging Adolfo, a former baseball pitcher who ruined his career with alcohol, as he moves from the home of his sister Maria to San Diego, hoping to live with his former lover, Isabel. Carmen, Maria’s daughter, goes with Adolfo, hoping to move in with an aunt and find a better job. Turned away by her aunt, Carmen is allowed to stay with Isabel. Adolfo, however, is forced to return to Maria’s house. Maria promises to help him find a job, but his pride prevents him from working in the fields or holding down a gardener’s job. He travels to Los Angeles, meeting a con artist, Antonia, who persuades him to move in with her so she can get his pension checks. She eventually throws him out, and he moves in with the Professor, another of Antonia’s victims. When the United States enters World War II, the Professor returns to Tijuana to avoid the draft. Adolfo accompanies him and marries a prostitute. He soon leaves her, however, and returns to Maria’s house. In the meantime, Carmen applies for a job at the Navy hospital in San Diego and shortly thereafter is recommended for nurses’ training in the U.S. Navy. She graduates at the top of her class and becomes an officer. Although Carmen is capable, her promotion is partly based on the fact that she is Latina. When Carmen becomes engaged to a white naval officer in the Philippines, Maria believes that she has lost Carmen. Maria, too, experiences significant changes. She begins to question God’s judgment when Carmen gets sick. When one of her sons is killed in battle, she loses her faith in God. She is alone and lonely. When Adolfo returns, Maria feels happy again. The two agree that Adolfo has wasted his life, but they are happy to have each other. — Wilma Shires

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Golden, Dorothy. Review of To a Widow with Children, by Lionel G. García. Library Journal 119, no. 6 (April 1, 1994): 131. A brief, favorable review which praises the novel for its success in the absence of sex and violence as it studies the problems of the family. Mutter, John. Review of A Shroud in the Family, by Lionel G. García. Publishers Weekly 232, no. 4 (July 24, 1987): 181. A review of the novel. The critic calls the work a satire which ridicules the use of Hispanic stereotypes while endorsing stereotypes of white, mainstream Americans. Ray, Karen. Review of Hardscrub, by Lionel G. García. The New York Times Book Review 125, no. 1705 (February 25, 1990): 7, 24. A detailed review of the novel, in which the critic finds much humor and irony, with special attention given to characters.

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Gabriel García Márquez Colombian novelist and short-story writer Born: Aracataca, Colombia; March 6, 1928 Also known as: Gabriel José García Márquez long fiction: La hojarasca, 1955 (novella; as Leaf Storm in Leaf Storm, and Other Stories, 1972); El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, 1961 (novella; No One Writes to the Colonel, 1968); La mala hora, 1962, revised 1966 (In Evil Hour, 1979); Cien años de soledad, 1967 (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970); El otoño del patriarca, 1975 (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975); Crónica de una muerte anunciada, 1981 (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1982); El amor en los tiempos del cólera, 1985 (Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988); El general en su laberinto, 1989 (The General in His Labyrinth, 1990); Collected Novellas, 1990; Del amor y otros demonios, 1994 (Of Love and Other Demons, 1995); Memoria de mis putas tristes, 2004. short fiction: Los funerales de la Mamá Grande, 1962 (Big Mama’s Funeral, stories included in No One Writes to the Colonel, and Other Stories, 1968); Isabel viendo llover en Macondo, 1967 (Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo, 1972); No One Writes to the Colonel, and Other Stories, 1968; Relato de un náufrago: Que estuvo diez días a la deriva en una balsa sin comer ni beber, que fue proclamado héroe de la patria, besado por las reinas de la belleza y hecho rico por la publicidad, y luego aborrecido por el gobierno y olvidado para siempre, 1970 (The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time, 1986); La increíble y triste historia de la Cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada, 1972 (Innocent Eréndira, and Other Stories, 1978); Leaf Storm, and Other Stories, 1972; El negro que hizo esperar a los ángeles, 1972; Ojos de perro 338

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azul, 1972; Todos los cuentos de Gabriel García Márquez, 1975 (Collected Stories, 1984); Doce cuentos peregrinos, 1992 (Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories, 1993). nonfiction: La novela en América Latina: Diálogo, 1968 (with Mario Vargas Llosa); Cuando era feliz e indocumentado, 1973; Chile, el golpe y los gringos, 1974; Crónicas y reportajes, 1976; Operación Carlota, 1977; Periodismo militante, 1978; De viaje por los países socialistas, 1978; Obra periodística, 1981-1999 (5 volumes; includes Textos costeños, 1981; Entre cachacos, 1982; De Europa y América, 1955-1960, 1983; Por la libre, 1974-1995, 1999; Notas de prensa, 1961-1984, 1999); El olor de la guayaba: Conversaciones con Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, 1982 (The Fragrance of the Guava: Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza in Conversation with Gabriel García Márquez, 1983; also known as The Smell of Guava, 1984); La aventura de Miguel Littín, clandestino en Chile, 1986 (Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín, 1987); Por un país al alcance de los niños, 1996 (For the Sake of a Country Within Reach of the Children, 1998); Noticia de un secuestro, 1996 (News of a Kidnapping, 1997); Vivir para contarla, 2002 (Living to Tell the Tale, 2003).

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abriel García Márquez (GAH-bryehl gahr-SEE-ah MAHRkays) is among the major figures in the great surge of creativity, from the late 1940’s to the early 1970’s, that placed Latin America in the forefront of the global literary scene. García Márquez was born in a Colombian village on the Caribbean coast. He was the first of twelve children. Owing to his parents’ indigence, he was reared by his maternal grandparents, who provided him with the stories, legends, and superstitions of Aracataca that were in time to inform a number of his short stories as well as his monumental novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. He was sent to school at the age of eight, after the death of his grandfather. Completing his early and secondary education at Barranquilla and Zipaquirá, he matriculated in 1947 at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá. During the 1940’s he read the modern writers, especially Franz Kafka and William Faulkner. In his freshman year in Bogotá his law studies were punctuated by his reading of fiction 339


and by the publication of his first story, “The Third Resignation,” a chilling Kafkaesque narrative about a comatose male who lives from the age of seven to the age of twenty-five in a coffin. The volatile political situation in Colombia, marked by the conflict between the Liberal and Conservative parties, culminated in 1949 with the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the Liberal candidate for president, and initiated a decade of civil bloodshed known as la violencia (the violence). The university in Bogotá had closed during the preceding year, and García Márquez continued his studies at Cartagena, where he abandoned law studies in favor of journalism. In 1950 he moved to Barranquilla and became a columnist for the newspaper El Heraldo. Four years later he returned to Bogotá and became a writer for El Espectador, the newspaper that had published his first story. His determination to become a writer had been fostered by his reading of Faulkner, and his first long fictional work, Leaf Storm (a Faulknerian rendition of the thoughts during a funeral that occupy the minds of the deceased’s son, mother, and grandfather), was published in 1955. In the same year he was sent by El Espectador to Geneva, where he was left without resources after the military government shut

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones. . . . The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. —from One Hundred Years of Solitude (trans. Gregory Rabassa)

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down the newspaper. He then spent some three years in Paris, living in poverty and continuing his writing. He traveled extensively to Europe, the Soviet Union, and Venezuela, where he edited Momento and, in 1958, married Mercedes Barcha. From 1959, the year of Cuba’s revolution, until 1961 he worked as a journalist for Fidel Castro’s Prensa Latina. In 1961 he, with his wife and son, journeyed from New York through Faulkner’s South to Mexico, where in the following year he saw the publication of eight of his stories in one volume. After the publication of more stories and novellas, García Márquez went into seclusion. He emerged in 1967, having written One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel that resists and revises conventional notions of temporality, morality, and the demarcations between life and death. The immediate international suc341


cess of this novel established its author as a major figure of twentieth century literature. In One Hundred Years of Solitude the history of the New World and of the human spirit is encapsulated in the generations of the Buendía family, the founders and chief residents of the fictional town of Macondo. In the novel the most ordinary events are related as though they were miracles, while ostensibly extraordinary events are presented as mere matters of fact. García Márquez’s distaste for extremist politics, especially dictatorships, is evident in his writing. The Autumn of the Patriarch is based upon the Venezuelan dictator of the 1950’s, Marcos Pérez Jiménez. The novel’s fictional counterpart, Zacarías Alvarado, is a grotesque whose atrocious tyranny is recorded in an unrelenting style that retains the humor of One Hundred Years of Solitude but darkens it with grisly and diabolic details. The regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile is depicted as oppressive in Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín. Pro-Marxism is much in evidence in this historically based first-person narrative of filmmaker Littín, who returned in disguise to Chile to compile a cinematic documentary of life under Pinochet twelve years after the violent overthrow of the Marxist president Salvador Allende in 1973. While his views on world events are well known and have been published under fictional guise and in journalistic form since 1968, it is for his Magical Realism that García Márquez has won international acclaim. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1982, and his Love in the Time of Cholera —with its assumption of the immortality of the lover’s vow, in which physical resurrection is implicit—was well received upon its translation into English in 1988. Critics and reviewers continued their praise of his talent and creative imagination upon the appearance of his short novel Of Love and Other Demons, recounting a twelve-year-old girl’s “possession” (the effects of an attack by a rabid dog) and a priest’s being possessed by rabid love in his attendance on her. In his prologue to Strange Pilgrims, a collection of twelve short stories written between 1976 and 1982, García Márquez is explicit about his concept of nonlinear narrative: A “story has no 342


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One Hundred Years of Solitude One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is the story of five generations of the Buendía family. It begins with the foundation of Macondo by José Arcadio Buendía and his wife Ursula. Despite their fear that the consummation of their marriage will result in the birth of a child with a pig’s tail (there is a family precedent for such an event), José decides to challenge fate. Macondo begins as a kind of primitive paradise. Modern civilization finally reaches Macondo, however, and with the arrival of the national political parties come civil wars caused by their conflicts. The Americans bring economic prosperity but exploit the workers. These intrusions of foreigners and modernity are eliminated by a flood that washes them away and returns Macondo to a state similar to its original paradise. In the end, Macondo is not a paradise, however, but a fiction: A member of the Buendía family deciphers a parchment written in Sanskrit which foretold the entire story of the family and Macondo from beginning to the end—that is, the story of One Hundred Years of Solitude. History is the completion of a fiction. Perhaps the most important achievement of this novel is its expression of a mythic reality. Entrance into the magical world of Macondo is an acceptance of the negation of rationality; in fact, the novel is recognized as one of the earliest to use Magical Realism. One aspect of this is mythic time that negates linear time. The repetition of numerous cycles, such as the names of the members of the Buendía family, create this sense of an eternal present. There is also a biblical level of reading that develops myth from Creation and Original Sin to the apocalyptic ending. García Márquez’s creation of a traditional yet fascinating story, his mastery of narrative technique, and his creation of myth make One Hundred Years of Solitude one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. — Raymond L. Williams

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beginning, no ending: it either works or it does not.” Scholars consistently make profound inquiries into the revolutionary art of García Márquez, with its inventive voice and its inexhaustible thematic constitutions, and readers delight in the strangely realistic humor of this creative artist, whom Thomas Pynchon once called a “straight-faced teller of tall tales.” — Roy Arthur Swanson Learn More Bell, Michael. Gabriel García Márquez: Solitude and Solidarity. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. This book explores García Márquez’s works from a number of different perspectives, ranging from comparative literary criticism to political and social critiques. Also included are commentaries on García Márquez’s styles, including journalism and Magical Realism. Bell-Villada, Gene H. García Márquez: The Man and His Work. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Includes biographical information on García Márquez, analyses of his major works, an index, and a bibliography. _______, ed. Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. A dozen essays on García Márquez’s masterpiece, comprising a wide range of critical approaches. Bloom, Harold, ed. Gabriel García Márquez. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Includes eighteen critical essays on García Márquez, arranged in order of their original publication. Also features an index and a bibliography. Gárcia Márquez, Gabriel. Living to Tell the Tale. Translated by Edith Grossman. New York: A. A. Knopf, 2003. The first in a projected three-volume autobiography. This volume covers Gárcia Márquez’s life from his youth until the mid-1950’s. González, Nelly Sfeir de, comp. Bibliographic Guide to Gabriel García Márquez, 1986-1992. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. An annotated bibliography that includes works by García Márquez, criticism and sources for him, and an index of audio and visual materials related to the author and his works. 344


McMurray, George R., ed. Critical Essays on Gabriel García Márquez. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. A collection of book reviews, articles, and essays covering the full range of García Márquez’s fictional work. Very useful for an introduction to specific novels and collections of short stories. Also includes an introductory overview by the editor and an index. Mellen, Joan. Gabriel Gárcia Márquez. Literary Masters 5. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. An overview of Gárcia Márquez’s life and work designed to support the research of high school and college students. Includes a glossary, annotated bibliography, and study list of questions. Pelayo, Rubén. Gabriel Gárcia Márquez: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. An account of Gárcia Márquez’s life, work, and literary style, helping students place him within the canon of Western literature. Solanet, Mariana. García Márquez for Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers, 2001. Part of the “Beginners” series of brief introductions to major writers and their works. Very basic, but a good starting point.

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Enrique González Martínez Mexican poet Born: Guadalajara, Mexico; April 13, 1871 Died: Mexico City, Mexico; February 19, 1952 poetry: Preludios, 1903; Lirismos, 1907; Silénter, 1909; Los senderos ocultos, 1911; La muerte del cisne, 1915; El libro de la fuerza, de la bondad y del ensueño, 1917; Parábolas, y otras poemas, 1918; Jardins de Francia, 1919 (translation); La palabra del viento, 1921; El romero alucinado, 1923; Las señales furtivas, 1925; Poemas truncas, 1935; Ausencia y canto, 1937; El diluvio del fuego, 1938; Tres rosas en el ánfora, 1939; Bajo el signo mortal, 1942; Segundo despertar, y otras poemas, 1945; Vilano al viento, 1948; Babel, poema al margen del tiempo, 1949; El nuevo narciso, y otras poemas, 1952. short fiction: “Una hembra,” 1895; “La chiquilla,” 1907; “A vuelo,” 1908. nonfiction: “Algunos aspectos de la lírica mexicana,” 1932; El hombre del búho, 1944; La apacible locura, 1951.

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nrique González Martínez (ehn-REE-kay gahn-ZAH-lehs mahrTEE-nehs) achieved his first literary success at an early age. When he was fourteen years old, he won first prize in a contest organized by the English-Spanish newspaper of Guadalajara, The Sun, for his translation of an English poem about John Milton. Later in his life, he was Effective Member of the prestigious Mexican Academy of Language, president of the Athenaeum of the Youth of Mexico, member of the Seminary of Mexican Culture, Founding Member of the renowned National College of Mexico, and a professor of language and literature at various institutions of higher education. He received the 1944 Manuel Ávila Camacho Literary Award, was president of the organizing committee of the American Continental Congress of Peace, and, in 1949, was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. González Martínez was born in Guadalajara, the capital of

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the state of Jalisco, Mexico, on April 13, 1871. He was the son of a schoolteacher, José María González, and his wife, Feliciana Martínez. González Martínez attended the grade school directed by his father, and in 1881, he entered the preparatory school run by the Church in the Conciliar Seminary of his native city. Five years later, when he was only fifteen, he entered the School of Medicine of Guadalajara. González Martínez’s fondness for poetry began at a very early age. As a child, he often amazed his parents and other adults with his achievements as a student as well as with his ability to write verse. Although he devoted himself with enthusiasm to the study of medicine during his student years, his interest in poetry grew. When he was graduated as a medical doctor in 1893, he had already published a number of poems in newspapers and magazines, earning for himself a reputation as a provincial poet. Despite his appointment upon graduation as an adjunct professor of physiology in the School of Medicine in Guadalajara, González Martínez did not have much success practicing medicine in his native city. At this time, González Martínez’s father was offered the post of headmaster in a school that was going to be opened in Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa. It was an excellent opportunity to improve the family’s economic situ-

Wring the swan’s neck who with deceiving plumage inscribes his whiteness on the azure stream; he merely vaunts his grace and nothing feels of nature’s voice or of the soul of things. Every form eschew and every language whose processes with deep life’s inner rhythm are out of harmony . . . and greatly worship life, and let life understand your homage. —from “Wring the Swan’s Neck” (trans. Samuel Beckett)

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ation, and since González Martínez had yet to establish himself as a physician, he decided to move to Culiacán with his parents and his younger sister, Josefina. They arrived there at the end of 1895, and for the next six months González Martínez tried without success to establish his professional practice. After this time, he decided to move to the small town of Sinaloa, where he finally established himself and resided for the next fifteen years. In 1898, González Martínez married Luisa Rojo y Fonseca, a girl who had strongly impressed him when he had first seen her on his initial visit to Sinaloa. Their marriage produced four children—Enrique, María Luisa, Héctor, and Jorge—the youngest child, however, only lived sixteen months. The fifteen years that González Martínez lived in Sinaloa were a period of intense professional activity as a doctor as well as of incessant literary production. For some time, the poet seemed to be content with publishing his poems in newspapers and magazines of the provinces as well as the capital, where he

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was beginning to be known. Nevertheless, in 1900, an event took place that prompted González Martínez to publish his first book of poetry. For reasons not yet fully understood, a newspaper in Guadalajara published a false report of his death. Several publications in different cities expressed their sorrow for the early death of such a promising poet and reprinted poems of his that had previously appeared in their pages. One of González Martínez’s friends published a long article lamenting the death of the poet, recalling his life, listing his successes, and praising his virtues as a physician, a man of letters, and a citizen. When all of this came to the attention of González Martínez in the small town where he lived, the poet rushed to deny the false information, and in a letter written in a joking tone he thanked his friend from Guadalajara for the informative and sorrowful article. After the uproar occasioned by this event had passed, the poet concluded that his poems must be good enough to be published in book form, and thus his first collection, titled Preludios (preludes), appeared in 1903. Although González Martínez continued practicing medicine, his other activities seemed to multiply after the publication of his first book. In 1907, he published Lirismos (lyricisms), his second book of poetry, and between 1907 and 1909 he edited, along with his friend Sixto Osuna, the magazine Arte, which was published in Mocorito. Between 1907 and 1911, he occupied the position of Political Prefect in the districts of Mocorito, El Fuerte, and Mazatlán in the state of Sinaloa, and at the beginning of the Revolution of 1910, he was the Secretary General of the government in Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa. In 1909, he published another book of poetry, Silénter (silently), and was appointed Correspondent Member of the Mexican Academy of Language. The year 1911 was of special importance in the life of González Martínez. It was during this year that he published his book Los senderos ocultos (the concealed paths). It was also the year in which he decided to abandon his medical career completely in order to devote the rest of his life to poetry, changing his residence and that of his family to Mexico City. There, he began to work as an editorial writer for the newspaper El Imparcial. 349


In 1912, he founded the magazine Argos, which appeared for only one year, and in 1913, he was appointed Under Secretary of Public Instruction and Fine Arts. After occupying this position for a year, he spent a year as Secretary General of the government in Puebla. In 1915, he returned to Mexico City to devote himself to teaching and was appointed a professor of Spanish language and literature and of general literature in the National Preparatory School, as well as in the Normal School for Women. He was also appointed a professor of French literature in the School of Higher Studies, later called the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. He soon lost his professorial positions, however, for political reasons. After 1915, the poetic production of González Martínez increased, and his books of poetry followed one another with a frequency uncommon even among the most prolific poets. Nevertheless, despite his constant dedication to poetry, in 1917 he went back to work for a newspaper, this time as an editorial writer for El Heraldo de México, while at the same time acting as coeditor of the magazine Pegaso. In 1920, González Martínez began his diplomatic career with an appointment as Minister Plenipotentiary to Chile, whence he was transferred to a similar position in Argentina two years later. After another two years, he was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary for Mexico in Spain and Portugal, and he held this position for six years, until 1931. The relatively peaceful life of González Martínez suffered two serious disruptions. The first was the death of his wife, Luisa, in 1935, and the second was the death of his son Enrique in 1939. The poet expressed in his poems the sorrow and the solitude that these two deaths caused him. In 1942, González Martínez was admitted into the Seminary of Mexican Culture. A year later, he was appointed Founding Member of the important cultural organization the National College of Mexico, and in 1944, he received the Manuel Ávila Camacho Literary Award. In 1949, he presided over the organizing committee of the American Continental Congress of Peace, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died as he was approaching his eighty-first birthday, on February 19, 1952. 350


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“Wring the Swan’s Neck” Although he was only four years younger than the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío and several years older than other major Modernistas Leopoldo Lugones (from Argentina) and Julio Herrera y Reissig (from Uruguay), Enrique González Martínez fits better among the postmodernists. It must be considered that this Mexican poet published his first book of poetry in 1903, when he was already thirty-two years old, and that he reached his peak when Modernismo was fading and postmodernism was at its apex. In this connection, the sonnet “Tuércele el cuello al cisne” (“Wring the Swan’s Neck”) should be mentioned. This is the famous poem in which González Martínez recommended the death of the swan, the symbol of Modernismo, and its replacement by the owl as less ornamental but wiser and more thoughtful: His grace is not the swan’s, but his unquiet pupil, boring into the gloom, interprets the secret book of the nocturnal still.

The poet himself said that his sonnet was not intended as an attack on Darío and the other first-class Modernistas; rather, it was directed against Darío’s epigones. Nevertheless, González Martínez’s poem was widely regarded as the death blow to Modernismo and the beginning of postmodernism. González Martínez’s aesthetic was fundamentally different from that of the Modernistas: He was inclined toward meditation and the patient study of the mysteries of life, rather than toward verbal brilliance for its own sake.

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González Martínez began to write when the poetic environment in the Hispanic world was dominated by Modernismo. The great Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío had succeeded in imposing his peculiar modality on this movement not only in Latin America but also in Spain. Modernista poetry was greatly influenced by the Parnassian and Symbolist schools of French origin, often featuring landscapes of ancient Greece or of eighteenth century France and including all kinds of exotic plants and flowers. The preferred fauna were animals known for their beauty, such as the peacock and the swan—especially the latter, which became a symbol of the movement. Metals and precious stones were used constantly as poetic motifs. The language of the Modernistas was musical and richly textured; adjectives were used profusely, and the imagery evoked strange impressions and sensations, synesthesia appearing with extraordinary frequency. It was only natural that a movement so generalized and powerful as Modernismo had an influence on a young poet such as González Martínez, who had an expansive concept of poetry and who was well equipped for artistic creation to the most refined degree. In his poetry can be found Parnassian and Symbolist notes, Satyrs and beautiful animals, musically elegant adjectives and synesthesia—everything with the clear desire to produce a refined artistic creation. For these reasons, many would consider González Martínez a member of the Modernismo movement. Nevertheless, González Martínez was never a Modernista in the style of Darío. His Satyrs and nymphs suffer from a lack of realism, and his fowls and stones—they are not always precious— do not function as mere ornaments in his poetry but contribute to the development of its ideas as well as communicate emotion. Closer connections could be found between González Martínez and Modernistas with the tendencies of the Cuban José Martí and the Colombian José Asunción Silva or with Darío in his later years, when his poetry was richer in insight and profundity. In González Martínez, interior concentration, simplicity of expression, and directness of communication are dominant characteristics. — Rogelio A. de la Torre 352


Learn More Brushwood, John S. Enrique González Martínez. New York: Twayne, 1969. An introductory biographical study and critical analysis of selected works by González Martínez. Includes bibliographic references. Geist, Anthony L., and José B. Monleón, eds. Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America. New York: Garland, 1999. A rereading of Modernism and the Modernist canon from a double distance: geographical and temporal. It is a revision not only from the periphery (Spain and Latin America), but from this new fin de siècle as well, a revisiting of modernity and its cultural artifacts from that same postmodernity. Goldberg, I. Studies in Spanish American Literature. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1968. A critical study of Modernism in Latin American literature.

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Nicolás Guillén Cuban poet Born: Camagüey, Cuba; July 10, 1902 Died: Havana, Cuba; July 16, 1989 poetry: Motivos de son, 1930; Sóngoro cosongo, 1931; West Indies, Ltd.,1934; Cantos para soldados y sones para turistas, 1937; España: Poema en cuatro angustias y una esperanza, 1937; Elegía a Jacques Roumain en el cielo de Haiti, 1948; Cuba Libre; Poems by Nicolás Guillén, 1948; Elegía a Jesús Menéndez, 1951; Elegía cubana, 1952; La paloma de vuelo popular: Elegías, 1958; Buenos días, Fidel, 1959; Poemas de amor, 1964; Tengo, 1964 (English translation, 1974); Antología mayor: El son entero y otros poemas, 1964; Che comandante, 1967; El gran zoo, 1967 (The Great Zoo, 2004); Cuatro canciones para el Che, 1969; El diario que a diario, 1972 (The Daily Daily, 1989); La rueda dentada, 1972; ManMaking Words: Selected Poems of Nicolás Guillén, 1972; ¡Patria o muerte! The Great Zoo and Other Poems, 1972; El corazón con que vivo, 1975; Poemas manuables, 1975; Por el mar de las Antillas anda un barco de papel, 1977; Música de cámara, 1979; Sol de domingo, 1982; New Love Poetry: In Some Springtime Place, 1994. nonfiction: Prosa de prisa: Crónicas, 1962; Prosa de prisa, 19291972, 1975-1976 (3 volumes); Páginas vueltas: Memorias, 1982.

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hough he is widely considered one of Latin America’s most notable poets, Nicolás Guillén (nih-koh-LAHS gwee-YEN) has been a particularly influential leader in the fields of African American and Afro-Caribbean literature. Raised in the central Cuban town of Camagüey, Guillén started writing poems in 1916, and his work was first published in 1919 in the journal Camagüey Gráfico. Unsatisfied after a year in law school in Havana, he returned to Camagüey in 1922 and began working as a printer (a trade he had learned from his father, who had been 354

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the editor of the local newspaper Las Dos Repúblicas before his death in a 1917 military uprising). Though he became deeply involved in journalistic pursuits, Guillén never abandoned poetry. He wrote a substantial amount in the early stages of his career (though most of it was not published for many years) and also coedited the literary section of Las Dos Repúblicas before founding a literary journal, Lis, with his brother Francisco. Some of his earliest poems were published in the journal; most of these were included again in an appendix to Ángel I. Augier’s Nicolás Guillén: Estudio biográficocrítico (1965). Guillén published no poetry between 1923 and 1927, returning to Havana in 1927 after a family friend helped him find a position at the Ministry of the Interior. He resumed work on his poems in 1927 but continued to have mixed feelings about Havana; for this reason many of the pieces written between 1927 and 1931 were published in journals in Mazanillo and other Cuban cities. These were eventually compiled in Obra poetica (1972). In 1930, the first versions of Guillén’s groundbreaking collection Motivos de son (motifs of son) appeared in the newspaper column “Ideales de una raza” in Diario de la Marina. Guillén’s insights into the Afro-Caribbean community—of which he was becoming an increasingly vocal part—continued to be solicited by his friend Gustavo E. Urritia until 1931, when the column was discontinued. It was not long, though, before

Your English, only a bit more shaky than your feeble Spanish, is good enough inside the ring for you to understand that filthy slang spit from the jaws of those you waste jab by jab. —from “Small Ode to a Black Cuban Boxer” (trans. Robert Márquez and David Arthur McMurray)

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Motivos de son Although Guillén’s earliest poetry followed the Modernist tradition begun by Rubén Darío and others, his astute political sensibilities soon led him to focus his literary energies on the unique heritage of the Afro-Cuban and mestizo populations. The results of these efforts were first published in Motivos de son (1930; motifs of son), whose eight poems have since been anthologized in several English-language editions. The son (sweet song) is a traditional Afro-Cuban form of rhythm and song, and its inclusion in the title is the first of many clear nods to African (primarily West African) influences on Cuban culture. These references are apparent throughout the collection—and through all of Guillén’s work— whether in the inclusion of traditional African call-andresponse patterns of speech and song or in pointed indictments of slavery in the Americas: Do you know my other last name, the one that comes to me from that enormous land, the captured, bloody last name, that came across the sea in chains, which came in chains across the sea.

Guillén began to collaborate with the Afro-Cuban leader Lino Dou on a new column, “La marcha de una raza,” which appeared in the newspaper El Mundo. These years also marked the official debut of two of Guillén’s major poetry collections. The first, Motivos de son, would exert significant influence on the African-based negritude and Latin American literary movements. The book abandoned the Modernist poetry of Guillén’s earlier work and rejected the negrista approach adopted by many of his contemporaries. Traditionally, these movements viewed Afro-Caribbean and African American culture through European eyes, sometimes with the aim of projecting a sense of Old World legitimacy onto New World cre356

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Motivos de son encountered a vehement but short-lived backlash among Afro-Cubans and an equally short-lived welcome among whites. Superficially, the collection seems to adhere to a legacy of portraying the negro bembón, a stereotype of African Americans that portrays them as ignorant and poor but satisfied and happy-golucky. Gradually, however, both populations realized that Guillén had created literature from centuries-old African oral tradition. His deceptively simple use of alliteration, allegory, and metaphor might have appeared to justify long-held prejudices about black people’s ignorance, but a close read revealed the poems to be condemnations of the circumstances that created these prejudices. However, Motivos de son is not merely a lamentation of Cuba’s social ills. Instead, Guillén suggests that the rich heritage of African-influenced speech, rhythms, and music are tools that Afro-Caribbeans should embrace with pride. Though he rejects the tendency to “exoticize” black people in the Americas, Guillén views their cultural contributions—such as the son, the rumba, the bongo, and the songs of plantation workers—as the basis on which any African American identity must be built. — Anna A. Moore

ations. Guillén saw these notions as backward-looking and instead adopted a decidedly more political approach, one that acknowledged the legacies of slavery and socioeconomic oppression and incorporated elements of the African diaspora’s rich heritage. Sóngoro cosongo, Guillén’s highly politicized second volume, solidified the poet’s already strong ties to Cuba’s political left wing. This alliance, whose early roots can be traced back to the sudden death of Guillén’s politically progressive father and to his own racially mixed roots, was energized by popular discontent under Gerardo Machado’s dictatorship, which fell in 1933. The following year, Guillén’s West Indies, Ltd. appeared. Like its 357

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predecessor, this book takes a harsh view of the United States’ increasing dominance, as well as colonial hierarchies and their influences on modern Caribbean (particularly Cuban) cultures. This collection, however, is particularly remarkable for the diversity of forms it employs, including both formal Alexandrine sonnets and rhythmic African-inspired jitanjáforas (made-up words). Meanwhile, Guillén’s political activity continued to intensify, and in 1935, it cost him his job at Havana’s Department of Culture. He started working at the journal Resumen, which was formally affiliated with the Cuban Communist Party, before moving on to Mediodía in 1936. As this latter periodical became increasingly influential and controversial, so did Guillén’s place in Cuba’s literary circles, and he was ultimately named the publication’s director. He moved to Spain in 1937, partly because of growing political persecution in his homeland, and joined the International Congress for the Defense of Culture as well as the Cuban Communist Party. After observing and writing about the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), he returned to Cuba to write for the Communist newspaper Hoy. An unsuccessful run for mayor of Camagüey eventually led to his departure in 1942 for a lecture and poetry-reading tour through Haiti and several South American countries. The tour continued until the 1948 murder of Guillén’s friend Jesús Menendez, an official in the National Federation of Sugar Workers, an event that inspired one of Guillén’s elegías (elegies). In 1951, Hoy was shut down by the government of Carlos Prio Socarras, and Guillén left for a tour of Eastern Europe, returning to Cuba shortly after the May, 1952, installation of dictator Fulgencio Batista. The new regime responded to Guillén’s satires in the newspaper La Última Hora by forcing him into exile in 1953. He remained without a country for six years, traveling during the first two and finding a safe if uneasy harbor in France until 1958, when Argentina offered him asylum. La paloma de vuelo popular (the dove of popular flight) deals primarily with Guillén’s political and personal frustrations, feelings that portended the impending Cuban Revolution. When Batista fled Fidel Castro’s rebel forces on January 1, 1959, Guillén returned as quickly as possible. His homecoming 358

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on January 23 was large and joyous, and Castro’s new government welcomed him warmly. In 1961, the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba was established under Guillén’s direction, and he remained the organization’s leader until his death. Meanwhile, he also resumed his work as a journalist, and was appointed ambassador-at-large and plenipotentiary minister in 1962. Guillén’s post-Revolution poetry was published in Tengo (I Have, 1974) and El gran zoo (The Great Zoo, 2004), which continued his extraordinary tradition of combining powerful social commentary with creative use of poetic forms. His attention to the subtleties of daily life and his unwavering support of Castro’s socialist government are apparent in La rueda dentada (the gear wheel) and in the two nonfiction collections published in 1972: Prosa de prisa 1929-1972 and El diario que a diario (The Daily Daily). By the early 1980’s, Guillén’s work had been translated into more than thirty languages. He was nominated by many contemporaries for the Nobel Prize and awarded Cuba’s highest honor, the José Martí National Order, but in 1986 he began to succumb to Parkinson’s disease, and died shortly after receiving the Maurice Bishop Prize (the only major regional award he had not won) in 1989. — Anna A. Moore Learn More Ellis, Keith. Nicolás Guillén: A Bilingual Anthology. Havana: Editorial José Martí, 2004. This anthology is preceded by an excellent introduction that gives in-depth analysis of Guillén’s life and works. Pieces are carefully organized to support Ellis’s thesis that love is the driving force behind each of Guillén’s poems. Kaup, Monica. “‘Our America’ That Is Not One: Transnational Black Atlantic Disclosures in Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes.” Discourse 22, no. 3 (Fall, 2000): 87-105. Focuses on the concept of blackness and the black experience as they are celebrated in the poetry of Guillén and Hughes. Studies the poets’ language as a tool used to denounce colonialism. 359

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Miller, Marilyn. “(Gypsy) Rhythm and (Cuban) Blues: The NeoAmerican Dream in Guillén and Hughes.” Comparative Literature 51, no. 4 (Fall, 1999): 324-345. A comparative study that addresses the distinct ways in which Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén problematized the notion of the American Dream in the United States and across the Americas. Yovanovich, Gordana. “Play as a Mode of Empowerment for Women and as a Model for Poetics in the Early Poetry of Nicolás Guillén.” Hispanic Review 69, no. 1 (Winter, 2001): 1531. Explains the ways in which Guillén’s poetry uses playfulness as a method of empowering women.

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João Guimarães Rosa Brazilian short-story writer and novelist Born: Cordisburgo, Minas Gerais, Brazil; June 27, 1908 Died: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; November 19, 1967 short fiction: Sagarana, 1946, 1966; Corpo de Baile, 1956 (subsequent editions in 3 volumes: Manuelzão e Miguilim, No Urubúquaquá, no Pinhém, and Noites do Sertão); Primeiras estórias, 1962, 1968 (The Third Bank of the River, and Other Stories, 1968); Tutaméia, 1967; Estas estórias, 1969; Ave, Palavra, 1970; The Jaguar, and Other Stories, 2001. long fiction: Grande Sertão: Veredas, 1956 (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, 1963).

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oão Guimarães Rosa (zhwown gee-ma-RAYNS ROH-sa) is generally regarded as the most important writer of fiction in twentieth century Brazil. The eldest of six children of a well-to-do businessman, he was born in the small town of Cordisburgo in central Brazil. He attended school in the state capital of Belo Horizonte and later completed medical school in the same city. He practiced medicine in the interior for some years, first as a private physician and later with the Brazilian National Guard. In 1934 he passed the Foreign Service examination, entered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and enjoyed a distinguished career in the Brazilian diplomatic service, attaining the rank of ambassador in 1958. Twice married, he had two daughters by his first wife. Although the bulk of his work was short fiction, Guimarães Rosa is probably best known for his single novel, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, the monologue of a former bandit about the meaning of life, particularly the significance of evil and love. The chapterless text runs to more than five hundred pages in length and is characterized not only by the thematic breadth and suggestive resonance of the narrative but also by the daunting complexity and novelty of the language in which it is told. In 361

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fact, all Guimarães Rosa’s fiction is marked by linguistic experimentation, a feature that accounts for the unevenness of the quality of the translations and also helps to explain why so few of such an important author’s works are available in any of the major European languages. Even though the density and intricacy of language is a constant, many of Guimarães Rosa’s works have a fairly conventional narrative structure. Sagarana, his first work, for example, contains nine tales that resemble very traditional forms such as the trickster tale, the fable, and the saint’s tale. Guimarães Rosa wrote the first draft of this book in the late 1930’s. When it garnered only second place in a national contest, he left it in a drawer and was not persuaded to edit and publish it until almost a decade later. Yet another decade passed before his second book appeared, and many had begun to think Guimarães Rosa had exhausted his imagination on the first book. In 1956, however, he published not one but two books. The first, Corpo de Baile (corps de

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Father was a reliable, law-abiding, practical man, and had been ever since he was a boy, as various people of good sense testified when I asked them about him. I don’t remember that he seemed any crazier or even any moodier than anyone else we knew. He just didn’t talk much. It was our mother who gave the orders and scolded us every day—my sister, my brother, and me. Then one day my father ordered a canoe for himself. —from The Third Bank of the River (trans. Barbara Shelby)

ballet), contained tales of such length that the book first appeared in two volumes, and later editions appeared in three. There are only seven stories in the book, which naturally piqued interest in the question of genre, since the tales were impossibly long to be considered short stories yet not quite long enough to qualify as novels. The second book to appear in 1956 was The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, a massive narrative; again critics called this work a novel only for lack of an alternative term. In both works, the stories proceed with an almost unnerving leisureliness; in both, a philosophical inquiry lurks behind every rustic; and in both the diction is aggressively experimental. One year after publishing these two books, Guimarães Rosa stood as a candidate for membership in the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He was not elected. Four years later, in 1961, the academy unexpectedly presented Guimarães Rosa with an award for the excellence of his collected works. The author’s diplomatic career was somewhat smoother. In 1958, he was promoted to Minister First Class with the rank of ambassador, and in 1962 he was named Chief of the Borders Division of the Brazilian State Department. In the same year, he published The Third Bank of the River, and Other Stories. This book offered some surprises, being the shortest yet to appear. It contains twenty-one narratives, which seemed to be a clear denial of the 363


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“The Thin Edge of Happiness” Guimarães Rosa’s “The Thin Edge of Happiness” seems simple: a five-page story broken into five vignettes that describe a young child’s sadness. Taken by an aunt and uncle to visit a new city being carved out of the wilderness (probably modeled on Brazil’s futuristic capital, Brasília), the boy, who remains nameless, is thrilled by the hustle and bustle of the frontier city, which is being built almost overnight by powerful machines, and the lush and seductive wilderness at his doorstep. The story is a parody of children’s once-upon-a-time tales: “This is the story: A little boy went with his aunt and uncle to spend a few days in a place where the great city was being built.” The narrator describes matter-of-factly, using short sentences, how the boy leaves behind his parents to fly with his aunt and uncle to the unknown frontier, how the plane trip is a child’s delight of new sensations, and how the place where he arrives is like a fairyland. One of these new things is a spectacular turkey, an animal unknown in the city; but no sooner is the boy’s

trend toward ever longer and more inclusive fictions. Although there are rural characters and scenes, it is also the first of his books in which locale is, even on a superficial level, of not much import. Critical reaction to the volume was mixed, because although the prose is unmistakably Guimarães Rosa’s—some considered it almost self-parodic—the tales are, in comparison with his other works, terse almost to the point of abruptness. Yet many gave the work high praise, and the Academy of Letters unanimously elected Guimarães Rosa to its ranks the following year. In 1967, Guimarães Rosa published Tutaméia (trifle), which contained not only forty stories but no less than four prefaces as well. That same year, the author finally scheduled his longdelayed formal seating in the Academy of Letters. Three days af364

João Guimarães Rosa delight with the animal described than it “disappears,” slaughtered for a birthday meal. The boy’s awe turns to terror: The turkey’s absence foregrounds the threatening wilderness from which the animal’s strutting had distracted him. The boy is then treated to what the adults intend as a marvelous display of the power of the machines used to carve the metropolis out of the jungle: A sort of juggernaut machete slashes down a tree so efficiently that the boy does not even see it fall. The boy feels sick as he contemplates the “astonished and blue” sky, exposed so brutally by the slash of the machine. In rapid succession the narrative juxtaposes implied opposites: known experiences versus unknown delights, childlike joy versus unfocused anxiety, wild nature versus “wild” machines, the wilderness versus civilization and progress, childlike wonderment versus adult matter-offactness, and the comforting versus the terrifying. More than a tale of the brutal shattering of youthful innocence, “The Thin Edge of Happiness” reveals typical Latin American conflicts: the natural versus the mechanical, spontaneous sentiment versus artificial power, the human versus the artificial and destructive. — David W. Foster

ter the ceremony, he died of a brain hemorrhage. In 1969, Estas estórias (these stories), which the author had been organizing shortly before his death, appeared, and in 1970 the miscellanea of four decades of writing appeared as Ave, Palavra (hail, word). Guimarães Rosa had no rival as the most important and original prose writer in Brazil in the twentieth century. He is widely regarded as a watershed figure, much as Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is regarded for the nineteenth century. He is also considered by many to be Brazil’s principal figure in the Latin American fiction “boom” of the second half of the twentieth century. His name is known to virtually all literate Brazilians, although it may be that his name is better known than his works because of the difficulties they present to readers. Because he is so demanding of his readers, his most enthusiastic following 365


abroad is composed mainly of writers, critics, and translators. In Brazil, his works attained best-seller status at least briefly. Guimarães Rosa’s works are demanding above all because the variety of linguistic novelties affects everything, starting with the title page. Many of the titles contain invented or deformed words, and the prose is hyperexpressive; in his variety of Portuguese, nothing is impossible. Guimarães Rosa spoke six languages and read fourteen others, and many of these languages crept into his prose in subtle and at times confounding ways. Diction in his works is further complicated by his willingness to use Latinate or Tupi forms, ungrammatical constructions, and neologisms. The style is also complicated by the fact that Guimarães Rosa was a medical doctor, an amateur naturalist, a student of Eastern mysticism, and a prodigious and omnivorous reader. The sources of names, motifs, and entire tales may be found in anything from Danish myth to the Brothers Grimm to Zen Buddhism, possibly all in the same story. It is not always necessary or even particularly enlightening to discover such sources, but the fact that such eclectic roots have been proven to exist in his fiction is a measure of their perverse originality. Yet, although these stories are not always accessible on first reading, all of them are sufficiently enchanting to make a second reading worthwhile, and further study often provides unexpected discoveries and delights. Guimarães Rosa’s literary career was an astonishment not only because he produced his fiction in his spare time but also because of the inventiveness of language, the range of theme, and the attention he paid to every detail. — Jon S. Vincent Learn More Armstrong, Piers. Third World Literary Fortunes: Brazilian Culture and Its International Reception. Lewisberg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1999. Examines the domestic and international receptions of Brazilian writers. Contrasts Guimarães Rosa, the “Brazilian James Joyce,” with Jorge Amado, who celebrates negritude and has been successful in turning Brazilian popular culture into literature. Coutinho, Eduardo de Faria. “João Guimarães Rosa.” In Latin 366


American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria Isabel Abreu. 3 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. An excellent introduction to the complete works, including remarks on language, causality, regionalism and universality, the use of myth, the importance of emotion, and the unusual position in Guimarães Rosa’s works of madmen, poets, and children. _______. The Synthesis Novel in Latin America: A Study on João Guimarães Rosa’s “Grande Sertão: Veredas.” Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1991. A critical study. Harss, Luis, and Barbara Dohmann. Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. Contains a fascinating and sometimes illuminating interview with Guimarães Rosa. Martins, Wilson. “Structural Perspectivism in Guimarães Rosa.” In The Brazilian Novel, edited by Heitor Martins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. Though focusing largely on The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, this study is relevant to the short fiction for its discussion of Guimarães Rosa as both a radical innovator of style and a “classic” writer in the traditions of Brazilian regionalism. Perrone, Charles A. “Guimarães Rosa Through the Prism of Magic Realism.” In Tropical Paths: Essays on Modern Brazilian Literature. New York: Garland, 1993. Discusses some of Guimarães Rosa’s short stories from the perspective of their Magical Realism; analyzes their relationship to modernity. Vessels, Gary M. “The Search for Motives: Carnivalized Heroes and Paternal Abandonment in Some Recent Brazilian Fiction.” Luso-Brazilian Review 31 (Summer, 1994): 57-65. Discusses the carnivalisque element in the heroes of such Brazilian writers as Jorge Amado and Guimarães Rosa; also discusses the mystery of motivation in Guimarães Rosa’s theme of the abandonment by the father. Vincent, Jon S. João Guimarães Rosa. Boston: Twayne, 1978. The first study of the complete works in any language. This critical study contains a brief summary of Guimarães Rosa’s life and is divided into seven chapters, one on each of the short fiction books and one on the novel. The bibliography is, however, dated. 367

Ricardo Güiraldes Argentine novelist Born: Buenos Aires, Argentina; February 13, 1886 Died: Paris, France; October 8, 1927 long fiction: Raucho, 1917; Rosaura, 1922; Don Segundo Sombra, 1926 (Don Segundo Sombra: Shadows on the Pampas, 1935). short fiction: Cuentos de muerte y de sangre, 1915. nonfiction: Xaimaca, 1923 (travel sketches).

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icardo Güiraldes (rih-KAHR-doh gee-RAHL-days), the son of a wealthy Argentine rancher, was born on his father’s estate near Buenos Aires. France attracted him at an early age, and he was reading French by the time he entered high school. This

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I went to school. I learned to swallow my tears and to mistrust sweet words. My aunts soon got tired of their new toy, and spent the day grumbling. The only thing they agreed on was that I was a lazy, dirty good-for-nothing, and to blame for everything that went wrong in the house. —from Don Segundo Sombra (trans. Harriet de Onís)

influence is revealed in the volume of poetry he published at the age of twenty-nine. He spent much of his life in Paris and died there in 1927. His boyhood on the ranch threw him into the company of the gauchos, or Argentine cowboys, one of whom, Segundo, was his teacher in the lore of the pampas, the Argentine plains. Segundo became the inspiration for at least one of his short stories of violence, published in 1915, and for the novel about his childhood, written while he lived in Paris, which established his fame. Initially, Güiraldes was influenced by the Vanguardist movement, which is reflected in the two novels Raucho and Rosaura and the travel book Xaimaca. While living in Paris, however, he developed a nostalgia for Argentina that led him to turn back to the influences of his youth. His poetic sensitivity transmuted the crude material of early gaucho literature into the novel Don Segundo Sombra, a story that became as popular with children as with adults. The book transforms the Argentine cultural heritage of the gaucho into a national myth. The gaucho tradition combined with the telluric strength of the pampas create a healing environment for the young orphan protagonist, who becomes a man in the course of the narrative. The novel became a classic and one of Argentina’s founding fictions. Güiraldes was involved in activities other than writing. He was a congressman and at one time the mayor of Buenos Aires. 369

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Don Segundo Sombra Don Segundo Sombra (1926) is based on the author’s recollections of his early life on the pampas. Influenced by works such as Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the narrative illustrates the experience of growing up in the countryside, having the ideal gaucho as a mentor and role model. Don Segundo Sombra symbolizes the pampas and its inhabitants and represents the gaucho culture as it once existed, before the invasion of economic and industrial progress. Often compared to Don Quixote in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615), Don Segundo is the last representative of a special kind of life that was disappearing. The coming-of-age story is told by the protagonist, a misdirected orphan named Fabio. In the first part of the novel, he meets and becomes the apprentice of Don Segundo Sombra. Fabio sees his destiny in a nomadic free life, hoping to become a real gaucho. In the second part, Fabio reviews the five years spent learning gaucho skills and overcoming physical and spiritual tests. In the third part, the reader sees him returning to his town of origin, ready to take over his new position as a ranch owner upon the news of his legitimate right to the possessions of his father, who recognized him as his heir before dying. In the last three chapters, Fabio recalls the departure of Don Segundo. The image of Don Segundo is seen through Fabio’s eyes. He admires gauchos and transfers his image of them to his mentor, who becomes a hero and father figure for him. Fabio is the protagonist, but Don Segundo is the main character of his recollections. He embodies the virtues of the gaucho Fabio wants to become: laconic, serene, proud, stoic, and respectful of others, prizing freedom above all else. In his journey with Don Segundo through the pampas, this delinquent, lazy orphan grows up to be an honest, hardworking member of society. — Ludmila Kapschutschenko-Schmitt

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His poetry is frivolous and mystic, and his stories are romantic and realistic, but his love for his native country and his ability as a writer found their ideal expression in one novel, Don Segundo Sombra. — Emil Volek Learn More Alonso, Carlos J. The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. A study of regional novels and their role in the development of twentieth century Latin American fiction. Alonso illustrates his general observations about the genre with an analysis of three regional novels, including Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra. Beardsell, Peter R. “Güiraldes’ Role in the Avant-Garde of Buenos Aires.” Hispanic Review 42 (Summer, 1974). Places Güiraldes within the context of Argentinian culture. Flores, Angel. “Latin American Writers: Ricardo Güiraldes.” Panorama, December, 1940. A review of Güiraldes’s life and work. Previtali, Giovanni. Ricardo Güiraldes and “Don Segundo Sombra.” New York: Hispanic Institute in the United States, 1963. An examination of Güiraldes’s best-known novel. Scott, Nina M. Language, Humor, and Myth in the Frontier Novels of the Americas: Wister, Güiraldes, and Amado. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1983. Compares how the three novelists tell stories of the frontier and the “wild west,” focusing on Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra, Jorge Amado’s Terras do sem fin, and Owen Wister’s The Virginian. Spell, Jefferson R. Contemporary Spanish American Fiction. 1944. Reprint. New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1968. Includes information about Güiraldes’s work.

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Martín Luis Guzmán Mexican novelist and biographer Born: Chihuahua, Mexico; October 6, 1887 Died: Mexico City, Mexico; December 22, 1976 long fiction: El águila y la serpiente, 1928 (The Eagle and the Serpent, 1930); La sombra del caudillo, 1929; Memorias de Pancho Villa, 1938-1940, 1951 (4 volumes; Memoirs of Pancho Villa, 1965). screenplay: Islas Marias, novela y drama, 1959. nonfiction: La querella de Mexico, 1915; A orillas del Hudson, 1920; Javier Mina, héroe de Espana y de Mexico, 1932 (biography; originally published as Mina el Mozo, héroe de Navarra); Filadelfia paraíso de conspiradores, 1933 (history); Apunte sobre una personalidad, 1954 (biography); Muertes históricas, 1958 (biography); Crónicas de mi Destierro, 1963 (biography); Necesidad de cumplir las Leyes de Reforma, 1963. miscellaneous: Obras completas, 1961-1963 (2 volumes).

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artín Luis Guzmán (mahr-TEEN lwees gews-MAHN), one of the most vigorous writers on the Mexican Revolution,

Ciudad Juárez is a sad sight; sad in itself, and still sadder when compared with the bright orderliness of that opposite river-bank, close but foreign. Yet if our faces burned with shame to look at it, nevertheless, or perhaps for that very reason, it made our hearts dance as we felt the roots of our being sink into something we had known, possessed, and loved for centuries. . . . Not for nothing were we Mexicans. —from “My First Glimpse of Pancho Villa” (trans. Harriet de Onís) 372

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was born in 1887 in the capital of Chihuahua, which later became the main field of operations of the famous revolutionary warrior Pancho Villa. Guzmán’s father, a colonel of the federal army, and his mother, who was related to wealthy families of Chihuahua, moved later the same year to Tacubaya, at that time on the outskirts of Mexico City, close to the famous Chapultepec Castle. The daily contemplation of this building, so important in the political history of Mexico, gave the boy a deep sense of history that eventually oriented his literary work. In the city of Veracruz, at the age of fourteen, he continued his studies and published his first newspaper, La Juventud, a work of ephemeral importance. 373


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The Eagle and the Serpent According to legend, the Aztecs’ capital city (presentday Mexico City) was founded in the spot where they found an eagle, devouring a serpent, perched upon a nopal. These images form the basis for this book, but to understand it, the reader must also take into account the history of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and the centuries of oppression that preceded it. The Eagle and the Serpent (1928) is divided into two parts: “Revolutionary Hopes” and “At the Hour of the Triumph.” In the first part, Guzmán, the author-narrator, tells of his adventures before the fighting peaked. In the second section, he tells of deeds that occurred during the most turbulent years of the conflict. The story opens when Guzmán embarks for northern Mexico so that he can help the revolutionary Venustiano Carranza in his fight against provisional president and usurper Victoriano Huerta. Unable to carry out his plan to contact Carranza, Guzmán returns to Mexico City, but his enthusiasm for the Revolution causes him to leave

Afterward, Guzmán entered the National Preparatory School and the National School of Law in Mexico City. After his marriage, he traveled to Phoenix, Arizona, to fill a diplomatic post. He returned to Mexico in 1910, a crucial year for the country, for it marked the beginning of the revolution against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Guzmán joined Francisco Madero, the leader of the opposition, and participated enthusiastically in several nonmilitary tasks. In 1911, he associated with the group called El Ateneo de la Juventud, a young intellectual movement of great importance in the revival of Mexican culture. To denounce the opponents of the revolution, he founded the newspaper El Honor Nacional. After Victoriano Huerta murdered President Madero and usurped the presidency, Guzmán trav374


again. In Ciudad Juárez the author meets Pancho Villa, who is for him the chief hero of the Revolution. Finally, he is introduced to Carranza and gradually begins to realize that personal ambitions will inevitably cause deep disagreements among the fighters. Several episodes are intermingled in this part of the work, and they may be the most interesting and representative material in the novel. Among them, “A Night in Culiacan,” and “The Murdering Spider,” emerge as masterpieces of suspense and narrative vigor. The second part of the novel deals with the triumph of the Revolution, in which Guzmán abandons Carranza, who he sees as too ambitious and corrupt, and joins Villa (despite his impression that the legendary warrior and his pistol were a single thing; from Villa’s gun, all of his friendships and enmities were born). Late in the book, Guzmán exultantly writes the most lyric pages he has ever composed. The sight of Mexico City and the volcanoes, the inhalation of the thin air of the plateau, the bath of clarity, and the perfect balance of person and environment deeply impress the “rebel who returned,” as Guzmán calls himself. Ultimately, though, Guzmán is caught between divided loyalties and finally expatriates himself to the United States.

eled to the northern boundary of Mexico to join the “Division of the North” that was commanded by Villa, and he eventually became Villa’s private secretary. When a schism developed between Villa and Venustiano Carranza, the new leader of the revolution, Guzmán supported Villa and was imprisoned in Mexico City. He was liberated by the Convention of Aguascalientes, when a new government appeared under the leadership of General Eulalio Gutiérrez. A new discord between this regime and Villa ensued, and Guzmán, caught between the obedience to the Convention of Aguascalientes and loyalty to Villa, chose to expatriate himself voluntarily in 1915. He traveled in the United States, France, and Spain and finally settled in New York, where he collabo375


rated in the publication of Spanish magazines. In 1920, he returned to Mexico. Again intervening in politics, he was appointed federal deputy and served in that post from 1922 through 1924 before political turmoil again necessitated exile, this time in Spain, where he remained almost twelve years. In 1936, he returned to Mexico and again devoted himself to journalism, publishing a weekly magazine of Mexican liberalism, Tiempo. He was elected a member of the Mexican Academy of the Language. Guzmán’s best works center on the Mexican Revolution. As an eyewitness of many revolutionary deeds and an actor in others, Guzmán was very well qualified to write about this drama of Mexican history. The Eagle and the Serpent, La sombra del caudillo, and Memoirs of Pancho Villa constitute a trilogy of great historical density. Although the term “novel” cannot be fully applied to his works, which appear more like a series of episodes or a mosaic of short stories linked together by the common denominator of the Revolution, Guzmán’s mastery of narrative and descriptive techniques, his keenness of observation of the revolutionary leaders, especially Villa, and the dynamism and elegance of his prose make him one of the outstanding writers of Mexican literature. Whereas Mariano Azuela preferred to write about Los de abajo (1916; The Underdogs, 1929) of the Revolution, Guzmán chose to present with great psychological acumen an intimate portrait of its leaders, with their ambition, nobility, instinctiveness, and desperation. Many historical episodes he relates are as full of suspense as fiction. His contribution was recognized when, in 1951, he was appointed the Mexican ambassador to the United Nations. In 1958, he received the Mexican National Award for Literature. — Emil Volek Learn More Bruce-Novoa, J. “Martín Luis Guzmán’s Necessary Overtures.” Discurso literario 4, no. 1 (Autumn, 1986). Studies the narrative structure and the characterization in two of Guzmán’s novels: El águila y la serpiente, and La sombra del caudillo. Brushwood, John S. Mexico in Its Novel: A Nation’s Search for Iden376


tity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966. Brushwood includes a brief discussion of Guzmán in his study of the Mexican novel’s development. Duffey, J. Patrick. “Pancho Villa at the Movies: Cinematic Techniques in the Works of Guzmán and Muñoz.” In Latin American Literature and Mass Media, edited by Edmundo Paz-Soldán and Debra A. Castillo. New York: Garland, 2001. Describes how The Eagle and the Serpent uses literary techniques similar to close-up shots in films, and compares the book’s treatment of the Mexican Revolution and Pancho Villa to the film adaption of Rafael Felipe Muñoz’s book, ¡Vámanos con Poncho Villa! Grimes, Larry M. The Revolutionary Cycle in the Literary Production of Martín Luis Guzmán. Cuernavaca, Mexico: Centro Intercultural de Documentacion, 1969. An examination of Guzmán’s work by an author specializing in the study of Mexican literature. Langford, Walter M. The Mexican Novel Comes of Age. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971. Includes several pages of information about Guzmán’s contributions to the Mexican novel. McLynn, Frank. Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001. McLynn makes reference to Guzmán in his chronicle of the revolution. Sommers, Joseph. After the Storm: Landmarks of the Modern Mexican Novel. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968. Guzmán’s work is included in this examination of Mexican literature.

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José María Heredia Cuban poet Born: Santiago, Cuba; December 31, 1803 Died: Toluca, Mexico; May 2, 1839 poetry: En el teocalli de Cholula, 1820; En una tempestad, 1822; Niagara, 1824; Al sol, 1825; Selections, 1844; Obras poeticas, 1875. drama: Eduardo IV, pr. 1818; Los últimos romanos, pr. 1829. nonfiction: Lecciones de historia universal, 1830-1831 (4 volumes).

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osé María Heredia (hoh-SAY mah-REE-ah ay-RAYTH-yah), Cuba’s national poet, is considered one of the New World’s first Romantic poets, despite the classical form of most of his verse, because of the intensity of his melancholy and introspective emotion and his deep feeling for nature. He was also one of the first to write about the American landscape. His En el teocalli de Cholula (on the temple pyramid of Cholula), written during a visit to Mexico when he was only seventeen, preceded the first Romantic poetry in Spain by thirteen years. His reaction to nature is shown in En una tempestad (in a hurricane), and especially in his ode about visiting Niagara Falls after having been turned down by his Cuban sweetheart.

Cuba, Cuba, what life you gave me, sweet land of light and beauty, how many dreams of fate and glory have I tied to your happy soil! I look at you again! . . . How heavily the harshness of my luck weighs upon me! Oppression threatens me with death in the fields where to the world I was born. —from “Hymn of the Exile” (trans. Pablo Peschiera) 378

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As a young boy, José María Heredia y Campuzano, related to the famous Cuban-born French poet of the same name (the author of the 1895 The Trophies), traveled with his parents to Florida, Santo Domingo, Venezuela, and Mexico, then returned to Havana to study law. Poetry and the theater also attracted him. At the age of fifteen, he wrote Eduardo IV, in which he and his contemporary, poet-dramatist Gertrudis Gómez de Avella-

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“On the Temple Pyramid of Cholula” In 1830 the youthful Argentine poet Esteban Echeverría returned to his native Buenos Aires after spending five years among the Romantic poets of France; his advice to his fellow writers was to break away from literary dependence on Spain and to hymn the natural beauties of the New World. José María Heredia was already using poetry to paint the American scene and express Romantic ideas in classic verse forms. In “On the Temple Pyramid of Cholula” he used ten-syllable unrhymed lines resembling English blank verse. Seated in the ancient Aztec temple, the youthful poet watches the sun setting behind the volcano Iztaccíhual, whose snowcap is tinged with gold. The stars come out, and as the moon descends, the shadow of Popocatépetl, like a colossal ghost, extend until it covers the earth. This eclipse of nature causes the poet to ponder the passing of the cruel Aztec rulers and all their glory. In this passing he sees how temporary is human fury and madness. In the poem, the reader finds such classical touches as a mention—in an American landscape—of the olive tree “sacred to Minerva” and of Titan and his struggle against the gods of Olympus. With the subjectivity of later Romantic poets, Heredia, though describing a scene in Mexico through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old, was actually poetizing his soul and its agony at what it saw. 380

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neda, both performed. That was her only recorded stage appearance, but she continued to write plays, as did Heredia, in Cuba and in France. In 1823, Heredia received his law degree and was admitted to the bar, but that same year, because of his liberal ideas and revolutionary activities, he was permanently banished from Cuba. In New York, in 1825, he published a volume of poetry that attracted wide attention, Al sol. William Cullen Bryant’s version of his “Ode to Niagara” was the first Latin American poetry translation published in the United States. Heredia reissued the book in an enlarged form in two volumes in 1832. He made several trips to France. Finally, he was invited by the president of Mexico to make his home there, and he became a Mexican citizen. Some criticism has suggested that Heredia might qualify as the author of one of the earliest Spanish American novels, Jicoténcal, which appeared anonymously in Philadelphia in 1826. Jicoténcal is a historical novel dealing with the conquest of Mexico, following the spirit of the Enlightenment pretty much attuned to Heredia’s own vision of Mexican history as expressed in his earlier poem En el teocalli de Cholula. Other critics, however, insist on the authorship of another Cuban, Father Félix Varela (1788-1853). — Emil Volek Learn More Fontanella, Lee. “J. M. Heredia: A Case for Critical Inclusivism.” Revista hispánica moderna 37 (1972-1973). A reassessment of Heredia’s poetry. Kahiluoto-Rudat, Eva M. “From Enlightenment to Romanticism in Spanish America: An Aesthetic Approach.” Hispanic Journal 2 (Fall, 1980). Kahiluoto-Rudat focuses on Heredia’s poetry as an example of changing styles and philosophies in nineteenth-century Spanish American literature. McVay, Ted E., Jr. “The Sublime Aesthetic in the Poetry of José María Heredia.” Dieciocho 17 (Spring, 1994). Examines the treatment of the sublime in En una tempestad, describing how Heredia drew upon philosophical theories of the sublime to create this work. 381

José Hernández Argentine poet Born: Chacra de Pueyrredón, Buenos Aires, Argentina; November 10, 1834 Died: Belgrano, near Buenos Aires, Argentina; October 21, 1886 poetry: El Gaucho Martín Fierro, 1872 (The Gaucho Martin Fierro, 1935); La vuelta de Martín Fierro, 1879 (The Return of Martin Fierro, 1935, included in The Gaucho Martin Fierro).

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osé Hernández (hoh-SAY ehr-NAHN-thays), Argentine poet, soldier, political office holder, and champion of minorities, was born at the Estancia Pueyrredón, province of Buenos Aires, on November 10, 1834; he died in Belgrano on October 21, 1886. He lacked the education of other Argentine writers such as Bartolomé Hidalgo, Estanislao del Campo, and Hilario Ascasubi, who are important figures in Gauchesque literature, because illness halted his formal education. Yet he was the poet read by the gauchos about whom he wrote. The unprecedented success of his narrative poem was such that in less than two years there were eight printings of it. However, sixty thousand copies

If they catch him enjoying himself they call him a drunk, and he’s a “bad character” if they find him at a dance— if he puts up a fight, he’s doing wrong, and if he doesn’t, he’s . . . done for. —from “Martín Fierro” (trans. C. E. Ward)

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The Gaucho Martin Fierro Martin Fierro, the hero of this poem (published in 1872), is a gaucho, born and raised on the rolling plains of Argentina. A gaucho was a mixture of the Spaniard and the Moor (or Spanish Muslim), transplanted to South America and mixed again with aboriginal Indians. The poem tells us that he was God-fearing, brutal, superstitious, ignorant, lazy, and kind, and while he roamed the plains he became a legend. Martin Fierro played his guitar and sang, telling of the sorrows of gauchos all over the land. The poem tells of the gaucho’s passing, which occurred after the 1850’s, when the last native tribes were being pushed northward. At the same time, the gaucho was being supplanted by progress in the form of barbed wire, railroads, immigrants, wheat, and the herds of purebred cattle and sheep and thoroughbred horses that have made Argentina famous. In telling the tragic story of Martin Fierro and his lost family and home, the poem includes many epic themes: the fight against injustice, governmental power, and nature, as well as the yearning for

of the first part of his epic poem, The Gaucho Martin Fierro, were sold before he could persuade himself to go on with its sequel. Country pulperías stocked copies, along with other essentials such as tobacco and food, for the cattle herders to purchase and read around their campfires. Hernández was an active participant in the delicate political situation of Argentina prior to the period of national organization and, later, he was an active opponent of the oligarchical interests of the ruling class. He was so closely identified with his work that as the robust, bearded man strode along Buenos Aires streets, people addressed him as “Don Martín.” The first part of The Gaucho Martin Fierro introduces the image of an individual whose family life is destroyed by the politi384

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lost freedom and lost loved ones during bitter years of exile. It also incorporates such motifs as the temporary flight to the land of a hated enemy and the rescue of a maiden in distress. Drenched with the pampas’ earthiness, the redoubtable but bigoted Fierro symbolizes the pampas and the gaucho himself. The poem presents the life cycle of both a place and of a group of people clearly representative of Argentina. The poetic style is brisk and clear, even though the language is replete with gaucho vocabulary and speech patterns. Martin Fierro’s character projects itself over the poem: The reader can empathize with him for the loss of his home and family; all the lonely bitterness of his cruel military years fighting the raiding Indians on the far frontier; and his sadness when he finally returns home to find his little cabin abandoned, his wife and children gone, and only one familiar figure, his old cat prowling unhappily around the well. The poem holds the reader’s interest throughout its stanzas and stands at the summit of Argentine gaucho literature. It has attracted attention in Spanish America, Brazil, and Spain, where famed author Miguel de Unamuno often read it aloud to his classes at Salamanca University. — William Freitas

cal decisions of the authorities. The poem does not limit itself to presenting a conflict between individuals and society; it also makes room for the display of the perspective of the marginalized, along with descriptions of rural customs and beliefs. The second part, in which the author pleads for fair treatment for the gaucho by the government, continues the narrative line and incorporates a character, old Vizcacha, who supposedly espouses the essence of the gaucho philosophy. The poet married Carolina González del Solar in 1863. In one of the many places where they settled, he founded the newspaper Río de la Plata and ran it for a year before his enemy, President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, closed it. In his newspaper articles, Hernández stated his opposition to the official policy of 385

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frontiers and his strong defense of the gauchos. He also wrote a handbook on farming and animal husbandry in 1881, but nothing else from his pen will have the permanence of his rhymed yarn of the gaucho, told in the literary language that Hernández helped to establish as a naturalized vehicle for expressing folk culture. Since it was first published, the poem and the main character have become key ideological aspects of Argentine intellectual history. — Daniel Altamiranda Learn More Benson, Nettie Lee, ed. Catalogue of “Martín Fierro” Materials in the University of Texas Library. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972. In commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Gaucho Martin Fierro. Borges, Jorge Luis. The Spanish Language in South America: A Literary Problem. London: Hispanic & Luso-Brazilian Councils, 1964. Includes a lecture on The Gaucho Martin Fierro. Foster, David William. Argentine Literature: A Research Guide. 2d rev. and expanded ed. New York: Garland, 1982. A long chapter is dedicated to Hernández. Papanikolas, Zeese. “The Cowboy and the Gaucho.” In Reading the Virginian in the New West, edited by Melody Graulich and Stephen Tatum. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Compares the cowboy myth in the westerns of Owen Wister to the gaucho depicted in Hernandez’s works about Martín Fierro. Scroggins, Daniel. A Concordance of José Hernández’ “Martín Fierro.” Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971. A useful research tool.

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Oscar Hijuelos Cuban American novelist Born: New York, New York; August 24, 1951 long fiction: Our House in the Last World, 1983; The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, 1989; The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, 1993; Mr. Ives’ Christmas, 1995; Empress of the Splendid Season, 1999; A Simple Habana Melody: From When the World Was Good, 2002.

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scar Hijuelos (AHS-kahr ee-WAYL-ohs) is widely regarded as a successful writer who has moved Latino cultural expression from the margins to the center of mainstream recognition. He was born to immigrant Cuban parents in the Spanish Harlem section of New York City. In his childhood, he witnessed the ordeals of his family in exile, and he suffered the turmoils of growing up Latino in the United States. Hijuelos’s father, Pascual, who worked as a dishwasher and a cook, died when Hijuelos was a teenager; his mother, Magdalena, was a homemaker who yearned to write poetry. His first novel, Our House in the Last World, published in 1983, is dedicated to them. This autobiographical work illustrates immigrant experiences similar to those lived by his family. The protagonists attach themselves to memories of a privileged life in Cuba while struggling to achieve success in the United States as members of an underprivileged ethnic minority. The isolation imposed by a different culture and language leads to feelings of alienation and powerlessness and often to violence and death. The visit of Hijuelos to Cuba when he was three years old is portrayed in the novel. After returning from the sunny and warm island, the young protagonists, Héctor and his brother, encounter the cold reality of the urban world in New York. They are ridiculed by other children for being Hispanic; at the same time they are called “Whitey” or “Pinky” because of their light 387

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It was a Saturday afternoon on La Salle Street, years and years ago when I was a little kid, and around three o’clock Mrs. Shannon, the heavy Irish woman in her perpetually soup-stained dress, opened her back window and shouted out into the courtyard, “Hey, Cesar, yoo-hoo, I think you’re on television, I swear it’s you!” —from The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

skin. The concept of being “Cuban” is questioned when other Hispanics consider them “American.” Like his characters, Hijuelos grew up with a sense of marginality and with a need to establish an identity within the two cultures. The use of Spanish words in the novel reflects bilingual and bicultural influences. His work becomes an expression of self-affirmation and the articulation of identity. Nostalgia for Cuba is a source of inspiration for poetic creation. Ghosts appear in the novel, in an imagined house which represents memory. The writing of recollections and remembrances constitutes a form of survival. Like his protagonist Héctor, the author finished college; his efforts were rewarded when he received bachelor of arts and master’s degrees from City College of New York. The novel won Hijuelos the Rome Prize for literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Hijuelos’s interest in Hispanic and Afro-Caribbean music and its strong influence on American popular culture is reflected in his second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989). The research-based novel is a well-documented chronicle of the 1930’s and 1940’s music scene in Cuba and the times and spirit of the 1940’s and 1950’s in New York. In this family saga, where glories of the past and complex relationships are relived through memory and imagination, musical creation allows the expression of emotions and spiritual survival. 389

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The search for the American Dream leads two Cuban immigrants—Cesar and Néstor Castillo, the Mambo Kings—to musical stardom and romantic adventures. The flamboyant Latin lovers, who fear a lifelong loneliness without love, have a macho, sexist attitude toward women. The younger generation, represented by Eugenio, born in America, recreates in the 1980’s the memories of his ancestors and the influence of their culture in America. The novel’s narrative movement is provided by the shifts from one character’s story to the next, going back and forth in time, with narrations in the first and third person. There are fluid transitions between English and Spanish. Extensive footnotes add to the monologues and dialogues in the text. During the writing of the novel, the author received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. The bestselling book was awarded the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in fiction and was made into a motion picture. The epic novel The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien appeared in 1993, offering the view of a woman’s world, in contrast to the male perspective of the previous work. In this saga of an immigrant Pennsylvania family with a Cuban mother and an Irish father, the large number of sisters portrayed seems to reflect the reality of Hijuelos’s family: The author’s father had nine sisters, and his mother had three (Hijuelos himself had only one brother). The patriarch of the O’Brien family, Nelson, marries the aristocratic Mariela Montez when he goes to Cuba as a photographer during the Spanish-American War in 1898. The Montez O’Briens’ first daughter, Margarita, is born at sea in 1902, en route to the United States. They settle in a rural Pennsylvania town, where the other daughters and finally a son, Emilio, are born. Readers follow their lives and loves in a chronicle spanning the twentieth century, moving from one character to another, from dreams and hopes to disappointments and tragedies. In this novel Hijuelos provides, once again, a colorful and heartfelt portrait of immigrant life in the United States. 390

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The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love Oscar Hijuelos’s life in an advertising agency had little to do with his passion for writing. When he first began thinking of the story that would become The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), he knew that an uncle and an elevator operator would be his models. The uncle, a musician with Xavier Cugat in the 1930’s, and a building superintendent patterned after an elevator-operatormusician merged to become Cesar Castillo, the Mambo King. Cesar’s brother, Nestor—laconic, retrospective, and lamenting the loss of a lover he left behind in Cuba—writes the song in her memory that draws the attention of Ricky Ricardo. He hears “Beautiful María of My Soul” as he catches the Mambo Kings in a seedy nightclub where gigs are cheap but long. Ricky’s interest changes their lives. The book altered Hijuelos’s literary career by winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1990. As the story opens, Cesar rots with his half-empty whiskey glass tipped at a TV beaming reruns. He seeks the I Love Lucy spot featuring Nestor and him as the Mambo Kings. Nestor has died. Cesar pathetically broods on the aging process, cirrhosis, and the loss of flamboyant times. Cesar’s old, scratchy records—brittle and warped— resurrect his music stardom. He laments his brother’s death by leafing through fading pictures. In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Hijuelos presents pre-Castro Cubans, who, after World War II, streamed to New York. All communities may strive for the American Dream, but in Latino quarters, music, the mainstream of a culture, sought to free the oppressed. Hijuelos pursues thematic progression: The Castillo brothers become, for a moment, cultural icons by their appearance on I Love Lucy. Their fame does not last, however; Nestor dies suddenly, and Cesar comforts his ego with debauchery before committing suicide at the ironically named Hotel Splendour. — Craig Gilbert

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Mr. Ives’ Christmas is a story of a man who must, over his life, cope with both a mystical vision and his son’s murder on Christmas Eve. The murder causes him to question his faith, but ultimately he finds spiritual peace. In Empress of the Splendid Season, Hijuelos follows the fortunes of Lydia España over half a century, from being exiled by her Cuban family for a sexual indiscretion to making a life for herself in New York. A Simple Habana Melody: From When the World Was Good is also epic in scope, tracing the fortunes of a Cuban musician, Israel Levis, from the 1920’s to the 1950’s. Levis gains fame as the composer of a popular rumba, enjoys café society in the 1930’s, and then is mistakenly interned at Buchenwald when his last name is taken to be Jewish. The novel contrasts the expansive, luxury-loving Levis with the increasingly niggardly, mean-spirited world he lives in. — Ludmila Kapschutschenko-Schmitt Learn More Kevane, Bridget. Latino Literature in America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. This study of eight authors includes an analysis of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Luis, William. Dance Between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature Written in the United States. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University, 1997. Examines the work of Cuban American, Dominican American, and Puerto Rican American authors, focusing on Hijuelos and other prominent writers. Places these writers in a broader social, historical, political, and racial perspective. Muller, Gilbert H. New Strangers in Paradise: The Immigrant Experience and Contemporary American Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. Examines literature by Hijuelos and other writers whose work portrays immigrants seeking a new identity and the American dream. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. A scholarly study of Hijuelos and other Cuban American writers and performers who have become cultural figures. Seyhan, Azade. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. A study of writers who have emi392

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grated to other countries, including the work of Hijuelos and other bilingual and bicultural writers living in the United States. Shorris, Earl. Latinos: A Biography of the People. 1992. Reprint. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Focuses on the commercial and critical success of Hijuelos and his literary themes. Smorkaloff, Pamela Maria. Cuban Writers On and Off the Island: Contemporary Narrative Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1999. Includes a discussion of Hijuelos and Cuban-born writers who began their literary careers outside their native country.

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Rolando Hinojosa Mexican American novelist Born: Mercedes, Texas; January 21, 1929 Also known as: Roland Hinojosa-Smith (given name) long fiction: Estampas del valle, y otras obras/Sketches of the Valley, and Other Works, 1973 (English revision, The Valley, 1983); Klail City y sus alrededores, 1976 (Klail City: A Novel, 1987); Mi querido Rafa, 1981 (Dear Rafe, 1985); Rites and Witnesses, 1982; Partners in Crime: A Rafe Buenrostro Mystery, 1985; Claros varones de Belken, 1986 (Fair Gentlemen of Belken County, 1986); Becky and Her Friends, 1990; The Useless Servants, 1993; Ask a Policeman, 1998. poetry: Korean Love Songs from Klail City Death Trip, 1978 (printed 1980, includes some prose). edited text: Tomás Rivera, 1935-1984: The Man and His Work, 1988 (with Gary D. Keller and Vernon E. Lattin). miscellaneous: Generaciones, Notas, y Brechas/Generations, Notes, and Trails, 1978; Agricultural Workers of the Rio Grande and Rio Bravo Valleys, 1984.

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olando Hinojosa (roh-LAN-doh ee-noh-HOH-sah) views his various works as a single, ongoing novel. Entitled The Klail City Death Trip, this collective novel is still incomplete, although it constitutes a substantial body of writing: more than half a dozen works of prose fiction as well as Korean Love Songs from Klail City Death Trip, a work that intermixes prose and poetry. Each component of the collective work, excepting the mixed-genre work, is set in the area just north of the Mexican border in south Texas that is called “The Valley.” Korean Love Songs from Klail City Death Trip, although much of it is set in Korea during the 1950’s, focuses on military personnel conscripted from “The Valley,” as does The Useless Servants. Rolando was the youngest of the five children of Carrie Smith and Manuel Guzmán Hinojosa. The family became U.S.

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citizens in the 1840’s when a new boundary line between Mexico and the United States fell three miles south of where Manuel’s family had lived for more than a century. Carrie Smith had arrived in the Valley when she was six months old and her father, a Union soldier during the Civil War, moved to the area around Mercedes. Rolando was born in that area. Hinojosa’s mother, a schoolteacher who had been raised in a completely bilingual and bicultural environment, had a deep respect for Mexican culture. Both she and her husband, Manuel, insisted that their son attend private, Spanish-language schools so that he would develop an interest and pride in his Hispanic culture. Rolando thus absorbed the folklore and lifestyles of the Mexican Americans in the area, accumulating the store of detail that would later color his prose fiction. As a young man, Hinojosa was too close to his materials to realize their literary potential. During two years in the army, from 1946 to 1948, he distanced himself somewhat from the Valley, but it was not until 1951, when he was called back to serve in Korea, that he began to have a real sense of what he must write. After his Korean service he resumed his interrupted studies at the University of Texas at Austin and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1953. For a time Hinojosa returned to the Valley as a teacher. He then went on to earn a master’s degree and fi-

Before the year was out, Viola hooked up with don Javier Leguizamón; he owns those lands over to Edgerton there; those were old mexicano lands taken over by Anglo Texans first and by the Leguizamóns after that. Viola was with don Javier up to her twentieth, maybe her twenty-first birthday; it happened that she was replaced by Gela Maldonado, but that’s another story. —from “When It Comes to Class: Viola Barragán”

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nally a doctorate in Spanish from the University of Illinois. In 1970 he began teaching in San Antonio’s Trinity University. There he met Tomás Rivera, who encouraged his writing. Upon Rivera’s urging, Hinojosa submitted his Estampas del valle, y otras obras/ Sketches of the Valley, and Other Works to Quinto Sol Publications, who published it and named it recipient of their prize for fiction in 1972. As in most of Hinojosa’s writing, this initial publication contains disparate sketches of life in and around Mercedes. Some of the tales contradict others in the collection, but Hinojosa is undisturbed by this, contending that it is because he is offering different points of view that some of his characters contradict others. Such, he contends, is the nature of life. 396

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Klail City Klail City (1976), part of the Klail City Death Trip, a chronicle of the Texas Rio Grande Valley, moves between past and present so that the two often appear to be the same. Like most of Rolando Hinojosa’s novels, Klail City lacks linear plot development. A series of vignettes create a sense of place and ultimately present a picture of a changing world. Several narrators, including the main characters of the series, Rafe Buenrostro (“good face”) and Jehú Malacara (“bad face”) tell the stories. P. Galindo, Esteban Echevarría (a kind of wise man throughout the series), Rafe, and Jehú recount a variety of tales ranging from tales of the Texas Rangers’ abuse of Mexican Americans to the story of how Alejandro Leguizamón planned the murder of Rafe’s father, Jesús, and the revenge exacted by Jesús’ brother, don Julián. There is also a kind of interior monologue by Jehú as he and Rafe attend their twenty-second high school class reunion. In “The Searchers,” P. Galindo tells the stories of migrant workers as they leave their homes in the valley to travel north to pick produce. Rafe gives a personal account of what it was like in the 1940’s for Mexican American students in the American high school, and Jehú recounts some of his experiences as an orphan, an acolyte, and a traveling evangelist with Brother Imás. There is also an account of how the whites used “bought” Mexicans to get their hand-picked candidates elected. In this and other stories, Hinojosa interweaves the past and present, particularly in the scenes that occur in the bars, where the old men, the viejitos, sit drinking and talking until don Manuel Guzmán, Klail City’s only Mexican American police officer, comes to take them home. In 1976, this eclectic collection of vignettes won Latin America’s most prestigious literary award, the Casa de las Américas prize. — Joyce J. Glover

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Hinojosa chooses to write sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in English, and sometimes in both languages. Estampas del valley, y otras obras and Klail City y sus alrededores were both written in Spanish and translated into English by others. Hinojosa wrote Korean Love Songs in English, because it was about Americans in Asia, but he wrote Mi querido Rafa, set in south Texas, first in Spanish and only then translated it into English. Perhaps the most typical of Hinojosa’s books is Becky and Her Friends. Many characters from earlier books reappear in this novel, which is essentially a collection of sketches and fragmented reminiscences about Becky, the wife of Jehú Malacara, from twenty-seven people who have known her in various contexts. By presenting Becky in this way, Hinojosa also reveals a great deal about the people discussing her. What emerges from this brief novel, as from much of his other fiction, is a composite picture of the social structure of the Valley. — R. Baird Shuman Learn More Hernandez, Guillermo E. Chicano Satire: A Study in Literary Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. This work explores how satire figures into the works of three Chicanos: Luis Miguel Valdez, José Montoya, and Rolando Hinojosa. It provides insights into some of the books in The Klail City Death Trip series. Karem, Jeff. The Romance of Authencity: The Cultural Politics of Regional and Ethnic Literatures. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Describes how stereotypical ideas about authenticity place constraints on the content and interpretation of works by regional and ethnic writers, including Hinojosa. Kaup, Monika. Rewriting North American Borders in Chicano and Chicana Narrative. New York: P. Lang, 2001. Examines Chicano literature since the 1960’s to analyze how Hinojosa and other writers approach the theme of the border between the United States and Mexico. Lee, Joyce Glover. Rolando Hinojosa and the American Dream. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1997. A good book398

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length work in English on Hinojosa’s works. Attempts to bring a biographical and psychological analysis to The Klail City Death Trip series. Pilkington, Tom. State of Mind: Texas Literature and Culture. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998. In this analysis of Hinojosa and other Texas writers, Pilkington seeks to determine the characteristics unique to Texas literature. Saldivar, José David, ed. The Rolando Hinojosa Reader: Essays Historical and Critical. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1985. This work contains essays by Hinojosa and by a small number of scholars treating Hinojosa’s works. Shows how early scholars analyzed The Klail City Death Trip series. Saldívar, Ramón. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. One of the most important works of Chicano literary criticism, this book contains a chapter treating Korean Love Songs from Klail City Death Trip and The Klail City Death Trip series. Saldívar’s analysis covers many of the most significant Chicano literary texts. Zilles, Klaus. Rolando Hinojosa: A Reader’s Guide. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. A guide to the Valley and its inhabitants, focusing on the theme of oral history represented in the series.

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W. H. Hudson Argentine-born English novelist and naturalist Born: Quilmes, Argentina; August 4, 1841 Died: London, England; August 18, 1922 Also known as: William Henry Hudson, Henry Harford long fiction: The Purple Land, 1885 (originally pb. as The Purple Land That England Lost); A Crystal Age, 1887; Fan: The Story of a Young Girl’s Life, 1892 (as Henry Harford); El Ombú, 1902 (reissued as South American Sketches, 1909; pb. in U.S. as Tales of the Pampas, 1916); Green Mansions, 1904; A Little Boy Lost, 1905. short fiction: Dead Man’s Plack and An Old Thorn, 1920. nonfiction: Argentine Ornithology, 1888-1889 (with Philip Lutley Sclater); The Naturalist in La Plata, 1892; Birds in a Village, 1893; Idle Days in Patagonia, 1893; British Birds, 1895; Nature in Downland, 1900; Birds and Man, 1901; Hampshire Days, 1903; The Land’s End, 1908; Afoot in England, 1909; A Shepherd’s Life, 1910; Adventures Among Birds, 1913; Far Away and Long Ago, 1918; The Book of a Naturalist, 1919; Birds of La Plata, 1920; A Traveller in Little Things, 1921; A Hind in Richmond Park, 1922; One Hundred Fifty-three Letters from W. H. Hudson, 1923 (with Edward Garnett, editor); Men, Books, and Birds, 1925.

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he naturalist and writer William Henry Hudson was born at Quilmes, a short distance west of Buenos Aires, on August 4, 1841. His father, Daniel Hudson, who was of English descent and born in Massachusetts, had left New England under threat of tuberculosis to seek a gentler climate in Argentina. There, he and his wife, Katherine Kimball, who came from Maine, raised a family of six children. William Henry, the fourth of their five sons, was a strong, alert child who rode his pony about the pampas and developed an absorbing interest in the 400

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bird life of the great plains. From these contacts with nature he learned much that was of later benefit to him, quite possibly more than he learned from the ill-equipped tutors with whom he had his formal training. At the age of twenty-eight, Hudson left South America to take up permanent residence in England. During his teens, an attack

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The Purple Land The Purple Land (1885) is a documentary novel containing no plot. Rather, it is an imaginary travelogue set in the Banda Oriental (now Uruguay). Its protagonist, Richard Lamb, has been forced to flee to Montevideo after eloping with the daughter of a powerful Argentinean family, and the story concerns Lamb’s wanderings in connection with an abortive attempt to find a job managing an inland plantation. At one point, he becomes entangled in the affairs of the rebel general Santa Coloma and fights with him in an ill-fated revolution. He also attracts the attention of several women, including two very beautiful girls who mistake him for a single man and are bitterly disappointed when he informs them belatedly of his unavailability. One of these women, however, he rescues from an awkward predicament and smuggles her back to Argentina in spite of the risk to himself (the reader has already been told in the first chapter that these wanderings preceded a long spell in jail, an event that was instigated by his vengeful father-in-law and broke his wife’s heart). The attractive features of this novel are the local color and the attention to anthropological detail. It offers a convincing picture of the life of the country, and one can easily believe that some of the episodes are based on experience, and that Hudson actually heard some of the tall stories that are told to Lamb by Santa Coloma’s rebel gauchos. — Brian Stableford

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of rheumatic fever had left him with a weakened heart, and he decided that Argentina was no place for someone who could not lead an active outdoor life. Moreover, the death of his father the year before had severed the last strong tie with his boyhood home. Hudson’s earliest years in England were marked by poverty and loneliness. For a time, he became secretary to an eccentric archaeologist, who often lacked money to pay him. In 1876, he married Emily Wingreave, a gentle woman fifteen years older than Hudson; she admired her husband unreservedly, though never completely understanding his peculiar gifts and qualities. After two experiments in running a boardinghouse failed, the Hudsons settled in a dreary house near Westbourne Park that had been left to Emily Hudson by her sister. Though he had been writing steadily since arriving in England, literary recognition came to Hudson only slowly. His novel The Purple Land, which came to be regarded as one of his best works, appeared in 1885, and in 1887 came his utopian ro-

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The species now being exterminated, not only in South America but everywhere on the globe are, so far as we know, untouched by decadence. They are links in a chain, and branches on the tree of life, with their roots in a past inconceivably remote; and but for our action they would continue to flourish. . . . —from The Naturalist in La Plata

mance, A Crystal Age. Neither book created much stir, but in 1892 The Naturalist in La Plata received favorable attention; thereafter, Hudson’s books won increasing, though still modest, circulation. In 1918 came the history of his childhood, Far Away and Long Ago; though highly regarded, it has probably been less read than Green Mansions, a brightly colored romance of the bird-girl Rima, set against the background of Venezuelan forests. Especially popular in America, it effectively combines Hudson’s gifts as a storyteller with his deep feeling for nature. After Hudson died in London in 1922, his literary reputation grew, possibly because an increasingly urban civilization had learned to value nature more than in the author’s own time. Hudson’s style is simple and direct. At its best, it embodies the author’s almost mystical sense of natural beauty. Very appropriately, Hudson’s London memorial is a bird sanctuary, established in Hyde Park in 1925. Learn More Arocena, Felipe. William Henry Harrison: Life, Literature, and Science. Translated by Richard Manning. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2003. Biography examining Hudson’s life and his writings on art and science. Arocena maintains Hudson created an original literature because of his experiences visiting and living in various cultures; these experiences inform the 403

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theme of crossing boundaries and frontiers that is common to his work. Frederick, John T. William Henry Hudson. New York: Twayne, 1972. A standard biography from Twayne’s English Authors series. Includes a bibliography. Miller, David. W. H. Hudson and the Elusive Paradise. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Contains chapters on all of Hudson’s major prose fiction, exploring such themes as the supernatural, the imagination, symbolic meaning, immortality, and ideology. Includes detailed notes and a bibliography. Payne, John R. W. H. Hudson: A Bibliography. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977. With a foreword by Alfred A. Knopf. Includes an index. Reeve, N. H. “Feathered Women: W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions.” In Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature, edited by Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells. London: Zen, 1998. Reeve explores the treatment of nature in Hudson’s novel. Ronner, Amy D. W. H. Hudson: The Man, the Novelist, the Naturalist. New York: AMS Press, 1986. A much-needed recent addition to critical studies on Hudson, examining Hudson’s work in relationship to his contemporaries, his immigration to England, and his development as a naturalist and writer. Concludes with an interesting account of Charles Darwin’s influence on Hudson and consequently on his writing. A useful bibliography is provided. Shrubsall, Dennis. W. H. Hudson: Writer and Naturalist. Tisbury, England: Compton Press, 1978. Provides much useful background on Hudson’s early years in Argentina and traces his development as a naturalist and his integrity as a writer on nature. Tomalin, Ruth. W. H. Hudson: A Biography. London: Faber & Faber, 1982. A lively biography that has been thoroughly and painstakingly researched. Highly recommended for any serious study of Hudson. Contains excerpts of the letter which Hudson wrote in an attack on Charles Darwin and of Darwin’s response. 404

Jorge Icaza Ecuadoran novelist Born: Quito, Ecuador; July 10, 1906 Died: Quito, Ecuador; May 26, 1978 long fiction: Huasipungo, 1934, revised 1951 (The Villagers, 1964); En las calles, 1934; Cholos, 1938; Huairapamushcas, 1948; El Chulla Romero y Flores, 1958. short fiction: Seis relatos, 1952; Viejos Cuentos, 1960. drama: El intruso, pb. 1929; Flagelo, pb. 1936.

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f the many novelists of Ecuador, perhaps the best known internationally is the social realist Jorge Icaza (HOR-hay ee-KAH-sah), whose works denounce the shameless exploitation of the Indians. While still a university student, Icaza and several classmates, with his wife Marina Moncayo as leading lady, barnstormed the nearby villages with a repertory of old Spanish farces and Icaza’s own comedies. His popularity diminished in 1931 when he began writing serious plays. When he announced the completion of a dramatization of Jules Romains’s Le Dictateur (1926) in 1933, the performance was forbidden by the government. Only then did Icaza turn to writing novels.

The day greeted Alfonso Pereira with enormous contradictions. He had just left in the hands of his wife and daughter, and to their women’s intuition and instinct, the unresolved problem of “honor at stake,” as he called it. As usual in a situation like this—from which he had to emerge blameless—he had banged the door on his way out, muttering a series of oaths under his breath. —from The Villagers (trans. Bernard M. Dulsey) 405

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The Villagers In The Villagers (1934), Alfonso Pereira is an Ecuadoran landowner plagued by domestic and financial troubles. His wife, Blanca, nags him, and he worries about his daughter Lolita, who wants to marry a man who is part Indian. Don Julio, his uncle, adds to his difficulties by demanding repayment of a loan of ten thousand sucres, a debt already three months overdue. When Pereira confesses that he is unable to pay the loan, Don Julio suggests that his nephew try to interest Mr. Chapy, a North American promoter, in a timber concession on Pereira’s mountain estate. Privately, the old man suspects that Mr. Chapy and his associates are on the lookout for oil and used their lumber-cutting activities in the region as a blind. In order to interest the North Americans, however, it will be necessary to build fifteen miles of road and to get possession of two forest tracts. Furthermore, the Indians must be driven off their huasipungos, the lands supplied to them in return for working on the master’s estate.

The great success of his first attempt, The Villagers, confirmed him in his choice of genre. The work was translated into six languages, including Russian and Chinese. After that, though he did such dramatic sketches as Flagelo (the scourge), his chief work was novel writing and running a bookstore in Quito. Huasipungo, the original title of The Villagers, is a Quechua term for a plot of land that the indigenous Andean Indian farm workers received for their own use. In his novel, Icaza denounces the suffering and exploitation of these dispossessed people. The didactic work became one of the best-known examples of the early indigenista literature and of Latin American social realism. Icaza’s first novel was followed by En las calles (in the streets), 406

Jorge Icaza Pereira agrees, and the road is built, but the Indians receive none of the benefits promised them, and many fall into lives of criminal activity and prostitution. The road makes it easier to get to the capital, Quito, where Pereira sells his grain rather than distribute it among the remaining Indians. Hunger stalks the region and babies and old people perish. When Mr. Chapy’s orders the Indians to sacrifice their homes again to make room for company houses and a sawmill, they rebel, killing six white men. Mr. Chapy and the other white men flee, but soon return—along the road the Indians built—and slaughter all the Indians. In The Villagers, the countryside is depicted as backward, isolated, and uncomfortable; the city is cultured and far superior. Nature is unattractive, and its dangers are stressed. The novel is almost devoid of color, a deliberate stylistic device to strengthen the novel’s feeling of dismal hopelessness. Intended as a tirade against the social injustice that then blighted Ecuador, The Villagers was initially better received and lauded abroad than it was in Icaza’s own country, though eventually it helped launch the cycle of socalled indianista novels, which are devoted to telling the story of the Indians. — William Freitas

which won a national prize. Cholos (half-breeds) is characterized by stark realism, and Huairapamushcas (children of the wind) depicts the Indians as scarcely above the level of animals, debased by their white overlords. His later work, Seis relatos (six tales), is told naturalistically and shows dramatic incidents building to a savage climax. — Emil Volek Learn More Dulsey, Bernard. “Jorge Icaza and His Eduador.” Hispania 44 (March, 1961). Dulsey, who has translated Icaza’a works into English, examines the author’s relationship to his native country. 407

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González-Perez, Armando. Social Protest and Literary Merit in “Huasipungo” and “El mundo es ancho y ajeno.” Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1988. An analysis of political and sociological themes in two of Icaza’s works. Jones, C. A. Three Spanish American Novelists, a European View: A Lecture Delivered on 10th February, 1966. London: Hispanic and Luso Brazilian Councils, 1967. Provides an analysis of Huasipungo by Icaza, Doña Bárbara by Rómulo Gallegos, and Muerte de Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes. Spell, Jefferson Rea. Contemporary Spanish-American Fiction. 1944. Reprint. New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1968. Icaza is one of the authors whose work is examined in this literary overview. Vetrano, Anthony J. “Imagery in Two of Jorge Icaza’s Novels: Huasipungo and Huairapamushcas.” Revista de estudios hispánicos 6 (1972). In this article, Vetrano, an Icaza scholar who has written a Spanish-language book about the author, analyzes two of Icaza’s works. Wishnia, Kenneth J. A. Twentieth-Century Ecuadorian Narrative: New Readings in the Context of the Americas. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1999. Places Icaza’s work within the context of Ecuadorian literature.

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José Lezama Lima Cuban poet, novelist, and essayist Born: Havana, Cuba; December 19, 1910 Died: Havana, Cuba; August 9, 1976 Also known as: José María Andres Fernando Lezama Lima long fiction: Paradiso, 1966 (English translation, 1974); Oppiano Licario, 1977. poetry: Muerte de Narciso, 1937; Enemigo rumor, 1941; Aventuras sigilosas, 1945; La fijeza, 1949; Dador, 1960; Poesía completa, 1970; Fragmentos a su imán, 1977. short fiction: Cuentos, 1987, 1999. nonfiction: Analecta del reloj, 1953; La expresión americana, 1957; Tratados en La Habana, 1958; La cantidad hechizada, 1970; Imagen y posibilidad, 1981; La Habana, 1991; Fragmentos irradiadores, 1993. edited text: Antología de la poesía cubana, 1965. miscellaneous: Orbita, 1964; Obras completas, 1975-1977 (2 volumes); Cartas, 1939-1976, 1978.

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osé Lezama Lima (hoh-SAY lay-ZAH-mah LEE-mah) is generally considered one of the most influential Cuban poets, novelists, and essayists of the twentieth century. He was born to a well-to-do military family, where old patrician and immigrant traditions blended into a true creole spirit. His father was a colonel in the Cuban army, and the family moved frequently with him. During the time they lived in the old damp fortress of Havana, Lezama Lima developed asthma, a condition from which he suffered for the rest of his life and which marked the rhythm of his poetry and prose. During World War I Lezama Lima’s father volunteered for war service on the Allied side, but he died in training in the United States during the influenza epidemic when Lezama Lima was only eight years old. Until her death in 409

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How certain is the mule’s step in the abyss. Slow is the mule. He does not sense his mission. His fate is facing the stone, stone that bleeds creating the open laughter of pomegranates. His cracked skin, tiniest triumph now in the dark, tiniest blind-winged clod. —from “Rhapsody for the Mule” (trans. José Rodríguez Feo, Dudley Fitts,

1964, Lezama Lima’s mother was the biggest influence on his life. It was she who urged her son, when he was already a successful young poet, to take up the family history in a novel. The suggestion eventually led to the novel Paradiso, on which Lezama Lima worked for almost twenty years. His mother’s death threw him into a deep depression, which he overcame by completing the novel. As a student of law, Lezama Lima participated in the protest against the dictatorship of General Machado that led to the university’s being shut down for years. Lezama Lima spent that time reading, accumulating the often quite arcane erudition that underlies his poetry. In his personal response to the crises of literary Modernismo, his poetic work followed the transformation of Symbolism into “pure poetry.” The encounter with the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez after his arrival in Cuba in 1936 from war-torn Spain was of lasting influence on Lezama Lima. He became interested in the mystical line of “pure poetry” and pushed it in the direction both of hermetic, heterodox philosophy and of orthodox Catholic theology. When his exuberant baroque images overflowed the marked intellectualism and exquisiteness of postsymbolist poetry, he developed in his Muerte de Narciso (death of Narcissus) the drama of the Fall of man that can only be overcome by artistic creation. Lezama Lima became the intellectual leader of the emerging Cuban post-avant-garde generation, whom he represented in 410

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Paradiso José Lezama Lima’s masterpiece, Paradiso (1966), combines the poetry and mythology that pervade many of Latin America’s literary traditions. The narrative is dense and complex and portrays a young Creole man whose success as an artist depends on the completion of his quest to understand his cultural, sexual, and individual identity. Paradiso consistently returns to several themes: the Fall of humanity and its resurrection in art, death, transcendence, and the importance of family unity. Many readers will recognize the title as a reference to Dante Alighieri’s description of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise in The Divine Comedy (1320), and both works rely heavily on the use of allegory, religious symbols and Baroque images in the construction of their complex and multi-layered narratives. The novel opens with its protagonist, José Cemí, whose family name comes from the great god of the Taino Indians, the inhabitants of Cuba at the time of the Conquest. The first name identifies the protagonist with the author, whose life story the novel loosely follows. Through José, Lezama Lima assumes as his own

the journals he edited. Among these were Verbum in 1937, Espuela de plata in 1939-1941, and, most particularly, Orígenes from 1944 to 1956, which came to be considered one of the leading Latin American literary journals of its time. Lezama Lima declared that he wrote poetry when he felt obscure, and essay when he felt clear, but it is revealing that he also said, “only what is difficult is stimulating.” Lezama Lima’s reputation gradually transcended the small group of initiated acolytes that had gathered around him in Cuba. Much of his fame was connected with what was known of his persona. His aesthetic and philosophical struggle with his 412

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the cultural heritage accumulated in his country from pre-Columbian times to the twentieth century. José is also an Everyman plotting his steps on an allegorical world stage. The novel continues with the sudden death of the boy’s father. Making sense of the loss becomes an obsession for the family and for the protagonist. Allegorical characters appear at decisive points in the protagonist’s life, such as Oppiano Licario, a symbol of Icarus, of initiation, and a surrogate father figure for the orphan. The next hurdle for the protagonist is his sexual initiation and his fall into the chaos of worldly temptations. Homosexual experience is joyfully described; only later does it seem that homosexuality is philosophically (or rather, theologically) disavowed, leaving some perplexity about the author’s intentions. Finally, Oppiano Licario reappears to pass the flame of artistic inspiration to the protagonist, who is, at the end of the novel, ready to start. Paradiso is a family saga, an artistic autobiography, an allegorical Bildungsroman, a long Baroque poem in prose, and a summation of Lezama Lima’s poetic philosophy. The homoerotic episode and the discussion of homosexuality in the novel caused some consternation among the revolutionary establishment in Cuba, and the novel went out of print in Cuba soon after its first limited edition. — Emil Volek

homoerotic tendencies, which became part of the novel Paradiso, caused a controversy in his Cuba, as did the moral stance he adopted during the Stalinization of the Cuban culture in the 1970’s, which led to his ostracism from the revolutionary regime. It is surprising that such a cultivated man as Lezama Lima practically never left his native Havana. Only in 1949 and 1950 did he make two brief trips to Mexico and Jamaica. He used this experience to create his aesthetics of the “American expression” as something essentially baroque, which he expressed in the lectures and essays La expresión americana. Later, after Paradiso had 413

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brought him international fame and recognition, he was prevented from leaving Cuba by the government, which blocked his requests for a passport. Lezama Lima had welcomed the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959 and even worked it into his visionary scheme of “imaginary eras,” by which means he characterized certain periods of world cultures. His enthusiasm was short-lived, however. Although he held an important nominal position in the writers’ union, he worked all his life in obscure jobs in Cuban literary research institutions; for that reason he sought an early retirement. Paradiso is an amalgam of Caribbean and Latin American culture. The autobiographical line of the novel provides a framework for baroque imagistic descriptions and arcane philosophical discussions that offer a dense, poetic, and mythical portrayal of a young man in search of his family and an individual, sexual, and cultural identity on which to set the foundation for his manifest artistic vocation. Family cohesion, death and epiphany, the Fall of humankind and its resurrection through artistic creation, are some of Paradiso’s underlying themes. The title relates the narrative to Dante’s story of a man’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, and Lezama Lima’s Paradiso builds heavily on allegory, Christian symbolism, Baroque imagery, and arcane cultural allusions, creating an immensely complex whole. The novel is a family saga, an autobiography, a Bildungsroman of a young artist, a long poem in prose, and a philosophical summation of Lezama Lima’s mythopoiesis. Lezama Lima spent the last years of his life in internal exile; his bitter isolation is reflected in many of his personal letters, some of which are collected in Cartas, 1939-1976. He left unfinished a sequel to Paradiso, the novel Oppiano Licario, and a book of poetry, Fragmentos a su imán. — Emil Volek Learn More Bejel, Emilio. Gay Cuban Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Explores how Lezema Lima and other Cuban writers have treated the topic of homosexuality, placing their 414

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work within a social and political context leading to the Cuban Revolution. _______. Lezama Lima: Poet of the Image. Gainesville: University of Florida, 1990. Focuses on criticism and interpretation of Lezama Lima’s works. Includes bibliography and index. Heller, Ben A. Assimilation/Generation/Resurrection: Contrapuntal Readings in the Poetry of José Lezama Lima. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1997. A specialized and scholarly study of Lezama Lima’s poetry. Bibliography and index. Levinson, Brett. Secondary Moderns: Mimesis, History, and Revolution in Lezama Lima’s “American Expression.” Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1996. Examines Lezama Lima’s notion of “American express” in detail. Bibliography and index. Pellón, Gustavo. José Lezama Lima’s Joyful Vision: A Study of “Paradiso” and Other Prose Works. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989. A study of Lezama Lima’s prose works and Paradiso in particular. Index. Salgado, César Augusto. From Modernism to Neobaroque: Joyce and Lezama Lima. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2001. A comparative study that provides criticism and interpretation. It also addresses the influence of these two authors on literary history. Bibliography and index. Souza, Raymond D. The Poetic Fiction of José Lezama Lima. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983. Lezama Lima’s writing is analyzed. Bibliography and index. Ulloa, J. C. “José Lezama Lima.” In Modern Latin-American Fiction Writers, First Series, edited by William Luis. Vol. 113 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Group, 1992. A good basic introduction to Lezama Lima’s life and work.

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Osman Lins Brazilian novelist Born: Vitória de Santo Antão, Brazil; July 5, 1924 Died: São Paulo, Brazil; July 8, 1978 long fiction: O visitante, 1955; O fiel e a pedra, 1961; Avalovara, 1973 (English translation, 1979); A rainha dos cárceres da Grécia, 1976 (The Queen of the Prisons of Greece, 1995). short fiction: Os gestos, 1957; Nove, novena, 1966 (Nine, Novena, 1995). drama: Lisbela e o prisioneiro, pb. 1964; Santa, automóvel e soldado, pb. 1975. nonfiction: Guerra sem testemunhas, 1969.

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sman Lins (AHS-mahn leens) was born in the state of Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil, a region whose cultural heritage is often elaborated in his fiction. Lins was the son of a tailor and was reared by his grandmother; he never knew his mother, and the author himself has speculated that his exploratory fiction may be psychologically linked to that loss. Lins went to high school in the state capital, Recife, where he also studied economics at the university. During this period he published his first stories. In addition, Lins studied dramaturgy at the university. He later wrote and published several plays, some of which were staged in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Lins moved to metropolitan São Paulo to work for the Banco do Brasil. After retiring from the banking profession and completing a doctoral degree, Lins taught literature at a private college. He soon resigned his position, both to dedicate himself to writing and in protest of the precarious conditions of higher education in Brazil, a topic he addresses in essays and fiction. When he died, Lins was in the process of finishing another novel. Lins’s early work is largely introspective but also has some regionalist features. O visitante (the visitor) concerns moral ques-

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tions and the relationship of personal awareness to behavioral codes. These preoccupations are also evident in the individual stories of Os gestos (gestures) and in O fiel e a pedra (the faithful and the stone), which is set in the author’s home state. This novel has an epic design (derived from Vergil’s Aeneid) and a clear moral intent. The hero, moved by passion and compassion, struggles to oppose injustice and to resist intimidation. In his mature works Lins reveals intense interest in the creative process, in authorial conscience, and in human consciousness. His later fiction is notably cerebral and revolves around structural experimentation. Lins avoids standard omniscient narrators and constructs intricate, at times hermetic, symbolic systems. Reflecting a complex vision of society, each of the nine “narratives” of Nine, Novena has a unique technique of narration or presentation, including use of graphic signs to identify narrators. The dense expression often embodies special codes or particular rhetorical constructions, as in “Retabulo de Santa Joana Carolina” (retable of St. Joan Caroline), which is based on the didactic model of medieval miracle plays. The complicated approaches of Nine, Novena and subsequent fiction are better grasped in the light of Lins’s speculative Guerra sem testemunhas (war without witnesses). This essay contains elements of memoir and fiction as well and is a key to understanding the evolution of Lins’s work.

The street we live on is one of the oldest in town. It has risen in status over the years. The original tiled sidewalk, almost buried, has retreated little by little over a long period, and street pavement and sidewalk merge. What month can it be? The end of August? The beginning of September? . . . Across from our house there lives a woman. She makes up for everything old and drab around. —from Hahn’s Pentagon (trans. Gregory Rabassa) 417

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Avalovara The structure of Osman Lins’s Avalovara (1973) is at once astonishingly complex and altogether transparent. The sequence of events is predetermined by a geometric design which appears before the first page of text, consisting of a Latin palindrome of five five-letter words with a spiral superimposed on it. To visualize this palindrome, envision a large square subdivided into twenty-five smaller squares—five across and five down. In the first row of squares place the letters S-A-T-O-R; in the second, A-R-E-P-O; in the third, T-E-N-E-T; in the fourth, O-P-E-R-A; and in the fifth, R-O-T-A-S. The entire square is centered over a fourteen-ring spiral. Each letter of the palindrome represents one plot line, and when the spiral touches a letter, a passage of that plot line appears. Since some letters are more frequent than others, plot segments vary in number of episodes from twenty-four (letter “O”) to two (letter “N,” which is in the center of the design). In addition, episodes increase in length each time that particular plot line reappears—most are ten lines long in the first epi-

The ambitious postmodern novel Avalovara is Lins’s major contribution. In characteristic fashion, the novel is an interwoven network of narrative lines. The work constitutes a synthesis of all the author’s fiction and an allegory of the art of the novel. Sexual relations and the instinct to reproduce are symbolic of writing as a necessary and natural regeneration of a moribund world. In the interplay of reality and fiction the main character’s love life is revealed to be a pretext to show the author’s translation of the outside world into words of fiction. Lins’s last novel, The Queen of the Prisons of Greece, challenges readers to unravel a system of representation. It takes the form of a diary analyzing an imaginary work of fiction about a problematic life in north418

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sode, twenty lines long in the second, and so on. Exceptions are the themes corresponding to the letters “P” and “T.” Six of the eight plot divisions directly involve Abel, the protagonist. Two deal with his love affairs, and the other four are all in some way concerned with the enigmatic V, with whom Abel lives a consuming passion and in whose arms he dies. One of the other remaining plot lines deals with the Pompeiian Publius Ubonius, who offers to free his slave Loreius if the slave can construct a magic sentence. The final subplot is the story of the obsessed clockmaker Julius Heckethorn, who designs a clock with a complex triple sound system which will some day play Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata in F Minor. As the reader approaches the end of the book, the spiral approaches the center of the square, and the various narratives, separated in time and space, draw together as Abel approaches something like an erotic transcendence in the arms of his mysterious and oddly polymorphous lover. The moment of this epiphany coincides with the beginning of a solar eclipse, which is precisely the second that the intricate clock, now in the same room with Abel, begins the sonata. — Jon S. Vincent

eastern Brazil. The novel is a layered critique of the hopelessly inadequate Brazilian welfare system and of the academic profession, particularly the branch of literary studies. In this way Lins reveals his abiding concerns with concrete realities and their reflections in works of imagination. Osman Lins was a leading exponent of a new fiction of vitalization that followed the mid-twentieth century advances of João Guimarães Rosa and Clarice Lispector. His fiction is important for its depth of introspection and for speculation about writing itself, and his writing reflects the efforts in Brazilian literature to integrate ethical and aesthetic perspectives. — Charles A. Perrone 419

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Learn More Andrade, Ana Luiza. “Osman Lins.” In Modern Latin-American Fiction Writers, Second Series, edited by William Luis and Ann Gonzalez. Vol. 145 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Group, 1994. A good introductory essay on Lins’s life and works. Frizzi, Adria, ed. Review of Contemporary Fiction 15, no. 3 (Fall, 1995): 155-222. In this issue, Lins’s wife, Julieta Goloy Ladiera, collects various interviews, commentary, recollections and articles on and by Osman Lins. Some of the articles are an interview by Edla Van Steen; an introduction to Lins by Dria Frizzi; critiques of several of his works; Lins’s essay “Of Idealism and Glory,” in which he discusses what it means to be a writer; and an essay by his wife about his career. Moisés, Massaud. “Osman Lins’s Avalovara: A Novel of Love?” In Tropical Paths: Essays on Modern Brazilian Literature, edited and translated by Randal Johnson. New York: Garland, 1993. Analyzes the narrative structure of the novel and its relation to eroticism. Simas, Rosa. Circularity and Visions of the New World in William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Osman Lins. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993. The specialized work focuses on the exploration theme. Lins’s Avalovara is specifically discussed. Bibliography.

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José Lins do Rego Brazilian novelist Born: Pilar, Paraíba, Brazil; June 3, 1901 Died: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; September 12, 1957 Also known as: José Lins do Rego Cavalcanti long fiction: Menino de Engenho, 1932 (Plantation Boy, 1966); Doidinho, 1933 (English translation, 1966); Bangüê, 1934 (English translation, 1966); O moleque Ricardo, 1935; Usina, 1936; Pureza, 1937 (English translation, 1948); Pedra bonita, 1938; Água-mãe, 1941; Fogo morto, 1943; Eurídice, 1947; Plantation Boy, 1966 (includes Plantation Boy, Doidinho, and Bangüê).

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ortheast Brazil, like the Deep South of the United States, at one time depended on slaves to work its plantations. Born at Pilar, Paraíba, on June 3, 1901, José Lins do Rego (hohSAY leenz doh reh-GEW) Cavalcanti was brought up in this region at a time when the plantation system was declining before the disrupting forces of modern society. When his mother died shortly after his birth, his father left him in the care of aunts and an old grandfather who owned a string of sugar plantations ex-

From time to time Old Totonha happened along at the plantation. And that was a red-letter day for the small fry. She lived by her fairy stories. Tiny and shriveled, so light that a puff of wind could have carried her away, she walked miles and miles on foot, from one plantation to another. . . . Without a tooth in her head, but with a voice that gave every shade of tone to her words. —from Plantation Boy (trans. Harriet de Onís) 421

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tending from the ocean to the sertão, a region plagued by alternating drought and floods. Educated for the legal profession in Paraíba and Pernambuco, Lins do Rego became a professor of law, the prosecuting attorney in the small town of Minas Gerais in 1925, and a bank inspector. In 1932 he undertook to portray in his “sugar cane cycle” the economic and social conflicts of his native region; these five novels were built around Carlos de Mello, who embodied autobiographical details drawn from Lins do Rego’s memory. The series follows Carlos as he grows up, goes to school, circulates among his friends of color in the city, and witnesses the de

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Plantation Boy Plantation Boy (1932) tells the story of Carlos de Mello, who at the age of four sees the bloody body of his dead mother shortly after his father killed her in an insane rage. The boy is taken from his city home to live with his maternal grandfather and aunts and uncles at the family sugar plantation, Santa Rosa. His father is interned in an asylum for the insane where he dies, completely paralyzed, ten years later; Carlos never sees him again. At Santa Rosa, Carlos begins a new life, and, upon his grandfather’s death, he ultimately inherits the plantation. Initially, he is full of plans to restore the dilapidated estate to its former glory. But crops fail and workers desert, and instead of caring for the land, Carlos develops the paranoid belief that his uncle Juca and the black worker Marreira (whose success is representative of the rise of the working class in Brazil) are conspiring to kill him and take over the plantation. Eventually, the factory that refines the plantation’s sugar refuses to extend credit, and Carlos runs out of money. Faced with the

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cline of the plantation aristocracy. Plantation Boy, Doidinho, and Bangüê are the best known of the sugar cane novels. Lins do Rego was already well known when he moved to Rio de Janeiro to enter the newspaper world. He married Filomena Massa, and they had three daughters. Lins do Rego was an uneven writer. He stands out among the increasing number of excellent Brazilian novelists for his character drawing and his simple, direct language, but most critics find his writing flawed by a lack of dialogue. Part of the problem may have been the speed with which he wrote, producing a novel a year. His defenders see in his preference for narrative so-

prospect of disposing of land at public auction, Carlos instead sells it to Uncle Juca and leaves the plantation without having learned anything of value from his experience. As he speeds away in a train, Carlos glimpses Marreira’s prosperous mansion, a symbol of the new social environment in which he had been unable to compete. Lins do Rego was involved in the Region-Tradition movement founded by Gilberto Freyre, who is considered his most profound intellectual influence. The result in Plantation Boy is a regionalism that fuses a lively view of local life and history with a submerged critique of the patriarchal plantation system. Unlike his grandfather, Carlos is sympathetic to the workers’ poverty, and his observations weave among his longings for maternal love, his morbid fear of death and disease, and his ever-present pessimism. Lins do Rego’s creation of a decadent post-slavery Brazilian Northeast has been compared to William Faulkner’s decadent rural American South. Certainly both writers are regionalists who describe crumbling plantation societies based on a single-crop economy that is ruled by a formerly slave-holding aristocracy. Plantation Boy is enjoyable reading, but its major strength lies in its vivid documentation of a time and place long since gone. — Linda Ledford-Miller

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liloquy the influence of professional oral storytellers he heard as a boy. Among his later works, Pedra bonita (wondrous or beautiful rock), with its picture of fanaticism in the sertão, is founded on actual happenings. Água-mãe (mother-water) is a ghost story of eerie moods that won the Felipe d’Oliveira award as the best novel of the year in 1941. Fogo morto (dead fires), a novel with excellent dialogue and characters (such as the Don Quixote-like Captain Vitorino Carneiro da Cunha, quite different from the morbid Carlos de Mello), returns to the sugar plantations to follow the rise and fall of the epileptic Lula de Hollanda, aristocratic master of Santa-Fe. Another departure from Lins do Rego’s earlier style is Eurídice, a psychological novel about sex, in which he experimented with new themes. In 1956, elected to the Academia Brasileira de Letras, Lins do Rego was supposed to eulogize his predecessor in his acceptance speech, but instead he shocked the members by declaring that

Manchette

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the man never wrote anything remotely resembling literature. The same statement could not be made about José Lins do Rego. — Linda Ledford-Miller Learn More Chamberlin, Bobby J. “José Lins do Rêgo.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria Isabel Abreu. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. A fine introduction for the beginning reader of Lins do Rego. Notes the autobiographical elements of his work along with its regional and folkloric influences. Ellison, Fred P. Brazil’s New Novel: Four Northeastern Masters. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954. Provides an excellent introduction to the new Brazilian regionalism of the 1930’s and 1940’s. One chapter is devoted to an examination of Lins do Rego’s works. A classic in the field. Hulet, Claude L. “José Lins do Rêgo.” In Brazilian Literature 3, 1920-1960: Modernism. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1975. An anthology of Brazilian literature in Portuguese with introductions in English. Short biography of Lins do Rego followed by critical commentary. Discussion of Lins do Rego’s style and techniques. “José Lins do Rêgo (Cavalcanti).” In World Authors, 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1975. Gives an overview of Lins do Rego’s life and summarizes each of the novels of the Sugar Cane Cycle. Includes a brief discussion of Lins do Rego’s detailed naturalism and simple, direct style. Marotti, Giorgio. Black Characters in the Brazilian Novel. Translated by Maria O. Marotti and Harry Lawton. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, 1987. Includes a discussion of the relationship between slaves and slave holders. Vincent, Jon. “José Lins do Rêgo.” In Dictionary of Brazilian Literature, edited by Irwin Stein. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Provides an overview of Lins do Rego’s life and work and discusses his involvement in the Region-Tradition school of thought and writing founded by the great Brazilian sociologist, Gilberto Freyre. 425

Clarice Lispector Brazilian novelist and short-story writer Born: Chechelnik, Ukraine, Soviet Union; December 10, 1925 Died: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; December 9, 1977 short fiction: Alguns contos, 1952; Laços de família, 1960 (Family Ties, 1972); A legião estrangeira, 1964 (The Foreign Legion, 1986); Felicidade clandestina: Contos, 1971; A imitação da rosa, 1973; Onde estivestes de noite, 1974; A via crucis do corpo, 1974; A bela e a fera, 1979; Soulstorm, 1989 (includes stories from Onde estivestes de noite and A via crucis do corpo). long fiction: Perto do coração selvagem, 1944 (Near to the Wild Heart, 1990); O lustre, 1946; A cidade sitiada, 1949; A maçã no escuro, 1961 (The Apple in the Dark, 1967); A paixão segundo G. H., 1964 (The Passion According to G. H., 1988); Uma aprendizagem: Ou, O livro dos prazeres, 1969 (An Apprenticeship: Or, The Book of Delights, 1986); Água viva, 1973 (The Stream of Life, 1989); A hora da estrela, 1977 (The Hour of the Star, 1986); Um sopro de vida: Pulsações, 1978. nonfiction: Para não esquecer, 1978; A descoberta do mundo, 1984 (Discovering the World, 1992). children’s literature: O mistério do coelho pensante, 1967; A mulher que matou os peixes, 1968 (The Woman Who Killed the Fish, 1982). miscellaneous: Seleta de Clarice Lispector, 1975.

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larice Lispector (klah-REES leh-SPEHKT-ur) is considered not only one of Brazil’s most innovative writers but also one of the giants of twentieth century fiction. Born in 1925 in the Ukraine, she emigrated to Brazil with her parents and two older sisters when she was two months old. The family settled first in the Northeast of Brazil but moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1937. From the time she was a child, Lispector read widely, start-

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ing with Brazilian classics such as José de Alencar, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, and Graciliano Ramos, and gradually adding such foreign writers as Fyodor Dostoevski, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf. While attending the National Faculty of Law, she began a career in journalism, developed close friendships with several of Brazil’s leading writers, and started work on the novel Near to the Wild Heart, which was published in 1944 and was awarded the Brazilian PEN Club’s prestigious Graça Aranha Prize. A surprisingly mature first novel, this probing, anguished tale centering on a woman’s search for self-identity set the direction that the author’s fiction was to follow for the next thirty years. In 1943, the year before she finished law school, Lispector married her classmate Mauri Gurgel Valente, who joined the Brazilian diplomatic corps upon their graduation. For the next fifteen years, Lispector accompanied her diplomat husband to posts in Europe and the United States. During that time, Lispector wrote two more novels and turned her attention increasingly to the short story, a genre in which she was to set new standards of excellence. After she was separated from her husband in 1959, Lispector returned with the couple’s children to Rio de Janeiro, her home for the rest of her life. The late 1950’s and the early 1960’s were extremely creative periods, during which Lispector produced perhaps her most accomplished work. Two thematically complex and stylistically innovative nov-

And she had returned at last from the perfection of the planet Mars. She, who had never had any ambitions except to be a wife to some man, gratefully returned to find her share of what is daily fallible. With her eyes closed she sighed her thanks. How long was it since she had felt tired? —from “The Imitation of the Rose” (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)

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Courtesy of New Directions

els, The Apple in the Dark and The Passion According to G. H., date from these years. Written in a slow-moving, poetic prose, they are evidence that, by this time, Lispector had achieved a thorough command of narrative technique and had matured into one of the most sophisticated practitioners of the “lyrical novel.” It was also during this period that Lispector published what are arguably her two finest volumes of short fiction, Family Ties, which includes some of her most frequently anthologized pieces, such as “Love” and “The Imitation of the Rose,” and The Foreign Legion, a collection of short stories, chronicles, and several nonfiction pieces, including a few in which she discusses her ideas about what literature is and what writing means to her. By the late 1960’s, Lispector’s reputation was firmly established in Brazil. As her works were translated into several languages, she quickly gained international recognition. Although 428

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in general her fiction grew more hermetic, some of her late work is quite accessible. Such is the case with Soulstorm, a collection of stories revolving around erotic themes and written in a subtly ironic and at times humorous style. Lispector’s novel The Hour of the Star, published shortly before her death from cancer in 1977, can be interpreted, at least in part, as an answer to those who accused the writer of being indifferent to Brazil’s social problems. Centering on the pathetic Macabéa, the novel alludes to the plight of migrants from the impoverished Northeast, who are attracted to the richer cities of the South. Nevertheless, even in this novel Lispector’s primary interest lies not in social issues at large but in the questions of human suffering and failure. An overtly self-conscious narrative, The Hour of the Star can be considered an example of metafiction and can be read as Lispector’s personal statement about the relationship between life and literature. Influenced by the existentialist philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Lispector returned again and again to the question of human beings’ place in an indifferent, contingent, and absurd universe. Lispector’s work revolves around a relatively small number of obsessive themes, including the quest for self-identity, humankind’s ontological loneliness, human beings’ difficulty in establishing connections with one another, and the conflict between the inauthentic existence imposed by social constraints and the individual’s search for an authentic existence. Most of her protagonists are middle-class women living in an urban environment. Nevertheless, although Lispector displays great talent in depicting the specific situation of women, her fiction is not only about the female condition but about the human condition as well. It is not surprising, then, that the issues confronting her male protagonists, such as Martim in The Apple in the Dark, are not significantly different from those confronting her female protagonists. Lispector developed an original narrative style that was perfectly suited to her themes. Lispector was not overly concerned with plot and character development; her novels have an openended quality and rely on a delicate, rhythmic pattern of im429

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Family Ties Family Ties (1960), the high point of Lispector’s work in short fiction, is truly one of the masterpieces of Brazilian literature, regardless of period or genre. It is composed of thirteen enigmatic stories, six of which had already appeared in Alguns contos (1952), and the stories focus on the act of epiphany. For example, in “Preciosidade” (“Preciousness”), a girl going through puberty experiences both fear and confusion after an ambiguous encounter with some boys. This story is particularly interesting in that the event that triggers the protagonist’s reaction is never fully described to the reader. The reader sees the character’s reaction to the event, however, and it is that reaction, full of anxiety and uncertainty, that constitutes the story, demonstrating that Lispector is not as concerned with the central event of her stories as she is with her characters’ reactions to the event. By not providing details concerning the event in this particular story, she assumes that her reader’s concerns are the same as her own. Another interesting story included in this collection is “O crime do professor de matemática” (“The Crime of the Mathematics Professor”), which recounts the story of a man who buries a stray dog he has found dead in a desperate attempt to relieve himself of the guilt he feels for having once abandoned his own dog. Finally, “Feliz aniversário” (“Happy Birthday”) tells the story of an old woman surrounded by her family on her eighty-ninth birthday. Rather than celebrate, she observes with disdain the offspring she has produced and, much to the shock of those in attendance, spits on the floor to show her lack of respect. All the stories in this collection present individual characters in turmoil and the way in which each deals with this turmoil from the inside out. — Keith H. Brower

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ages, designed to represent the fluidity of consciousness and to record an ineffable, deeper dimension of existence. Her best short stories evolve from an outwardly insignificant occurrence, which functions, nevertheless, as a catalyst for an existential crisis. Borrowing from Woolf and Joyce, Lispector makes consistent use of stream of consciousness and the epiphany. Together with her contemporary João Guimarães Rosa, Lispector is responsible for moving Brazilian fiction away from a somewhat parochial dependence on regionalism. Since the late 1970’s, Lispector has attracted much attention from feminist critics, particularly in Europe and the United States, who have hailed her texts as representing the best in “feminine writing.” Nevertheless, as the extensive bibliography on Lispector demonstrates, her work can be successfully approached from a variety of critical perspectives. A master of the modern narrative, Lispector possesses a well-deserved reputation as one of the most original writers in the twentieth century. — Luiz Fernando Valente Learn More Alonso, Cláudia Pazos, and Claire Williams. Closer to the Wild Heart: Essays on Clarice Lispector. Oxford, England: Legenda, European Humanities Research Centre, 2002. Collection of twelve essays examining Lispector’s novels, stories, chronicles, and children’s books. Barbosa, Maria José Somerlate. Clarice Lispector: Spinning the Webs of Passion. New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1997. A good study of Lispector’s works. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Cixous, Hélène. Reading with Clarice Lispector. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Chapters on The Stream of Life, The Apple in the Dark, “The Egg and the Chicken,” and The Hour of the Star. The book includes an introduction by Verena Andermatt Conley, carefully explaining Cixous’s playfully profound deconstructionist reading of Lispector. Recommended for advanced students. Fitz, Earl F. Clarice Lispector. Boston: Twayne, 1985. A useful introduction that includes a chapter of biography, a discussion of 431

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Lispector’s place in Brazilian literature, and a study of the style, structure, and point of view in her novels and short stories. Also contains a chronology, detailed notes, and a wellannotated bibliography. _______. Sexuality and Being in the Poststructuralist Universe of Clarice Lispector: The Différance of Desire. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Fitz provides a poststructural analysis of Lispector’s work, explaining how her characters struggle over, and humanize, their desires for the unattainable. Marting, Diane E., ed. Clarice Lispector: A Bio-bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. A full-length bibliographical resource. Peixoto, Marta. Passionate Fictions: Gender, Narrative, and Violence in Clarice Lispector. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Written with a decidedly feminist bias, Passionate Fictions analyzes Lispector’s frequently violent subject matter, juxtaposing it with her strange and original use of language. Special attention is paid to the nexus with Hélène Cixous and to the autobiographical elements of The Stream of Life and A via crucis do corpo. Santos, Cristina. Bending the Rules in the Quest for an Authentic Female Identity: Clarice Lispector and Carmen Boullosa. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Analyzes the female characters in works by Lispector and Boullosa, describing how the authors use an innovative narrative voice to depict women characters seeking their true voices and real life experiences.

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Eduardo Machado Cuban American playwright Born: Havana, Cuba; June 11, 1953 drama: Worms, pr. 1981; Rosario and the Gypsies, pr. 1982 (one-act musical; book and lyrics by Machado, music by Rick Vartoreila); The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa, pr., pb. 1983; There’s Still Time to Dance in the Streets of Rio, pr. 1983; Broken Eggs, pr., pb. 1984; Fabiola, pr. 1985, pb. 1991; When It’s Over, pr. 1987 (with Geraldine Sherman); Why to Refuse, pr. 1987 (one act); Across a Crowded Room, pr. 1988; A Burning Beach, pr. 1988; Don Juan in New York City, pr. 1988 (two-act musical); Once Removed, pr., pb. 1988, revised pr. 1994; Wishing You Well, pr. 1988 (one-act musical); Cabaret Bambu, pr. 1989 (one-act musical); Related Retreats, pr. 1990; Stevie Wants to Play the Blues, pr. 1990, revised pr. 1998 (two-act musical); In the Eye of the Hurricane, pr., pb. 1991; The Floating Island Plays, pb. 1991, pr. 1994 as Floating Islands (cycle of four plays; includes The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa, Fabiola, In the Eye of the Hurricane, and Broken Eggs); 1979, pr. 1991; Breathing It In, pr. 1993; Three Ways to Go Blind, pr. 1994; Between the Sheets, pr. 1996 (music by Mike Nolan and Scott Williams); Cuba and the Night, pr. 1997; Crocodile Eyes, pr. 1999; Havana Is Waiting, pr. 2001 (originally pr. 2001 as When the Sea Drowns in Sand). screenplay: Exiles in New York, 1999. translation: The Day You’ll Love Me, pr. 1989 (of José Ignacio Cabrujas’s play El día que me quieras).

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duardo Machado (eh-DWAHR-doh mah-CHAH-doh) arrived from Cuba in 1961, at age eight, with his brother Jesús, five years younger, as a “Peter Pan” child. The Peter Pan Project, a collaboration between a United States-based Roman Catholic bishop and the United States Central Intelligence Agency, brought fourteen thousand Cuban children to the 433

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Machado’s Gender-Bending Plays Although Machado’s early works often examine issues of immigrant identity, he leaves his immigrant theme behind with such major works as Stevie Wants to Play the Blues (1990), a musical about a female singer who transforms herself into a man, and Don Juan in New York City (1988), which is chiefly about sexual ambivalence in the age of AIDS. The latter play, a work that is operatic in scope and amplitude, centers on D. J. (Don Juan), an experimental filmmaker. Apparently bisexual, D. J. is torn between a female singer-celebrity, Flora, and his trashy male lover, Steve. His conflict is enacted against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic: D. J.’s good friend, Paul, a female impersonator, has taken refuge in the guise of Carole Channing and is preparing first for a concert of Channing’s songs and subsequently for a successful suicide, as he eludes the depredations of AIDS. The baroque action is further complicated by actual film clips from D. J.’s creations and by passionate songs performed by two mysterious figures, Abuelo and Mujer, representatives of the world of traditional heterosexual love for which the classic Don Juan was known. Machado has called Stevie Wants to Play the Blues a “gender-bender,” a genre in which he examines premises about sexuality and takes the characters through surprising and unconventional revelations about their gender identifications. Other plays in which he toys with the notion of sexual identity are Related Retreats (1990), about the lives of writers at an arts colony under the tutelage of a female guru, and Breathing It In (1993), about a motley band of lost souls who congregate around a male/female guru couple. It at once satirizes groups such as Werner Erhard’s individual, social transformation technique (EST) and the women’s liberation movement of the 1970’s and 1980’s and concocts a string of variations on sexual transformation among its characters. — David Willinger

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United States without their parents, ostensibly to “save” them from communism and from the governmental policies under Fidel Castro. Arriving with no knowledge of English and undergoing major culture shock, the brothers were sent to an aunt and uncle in Hialeah, Florida, who had their own children as well as other immigrant relatives living with them. Machado’s first memory of the United States is celebrating Halloween by trick-or-treating, believing that they had been sent out truly begging, as the children had moved from an economically privileged childhood in Cuba to poverty in the United States. His parents came a year later. The house in which Machado had lived in Cuba was taken by the government and transformed into a school. His father, a self-professed “professional rich man’s son,” initially could not find work in United States. Machado finished growing up in Canoga Park, a suburb of Los Angeles. By the time Machado was sixteen, his father had succeeded economically as an accountant. Machado’s parents later divorced, reportedly due to his father’s infidelity, which has been an item in his dramatic work. Machado began his acting career in 1978 at the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, where he met Maria Irene Fornes, a Cuban immigrant playwright who would become a major influence on his work. He became her assistant on her Fefu and Her Friends (1977) at the Ensemble Studio Theater. Machado began writing plays at the suggestion of a therapist, who recommended writing an imaginary letter forgiving his mother for sending him away. By 2002, Machado had written twenty-seven plays, all but seven dealing with his family or Cuba in some way. In New York City, as part of INTAR (International Arts Relations) Hispanic American Arts Center, he wrote The Floating Island Plays (The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa, Fabiola, Broken Eggs, and In the Eye of the Hurricane ) between 1983 and 1991. He has been commissioned to write plays for The Public Theater, the Roundabout Theatre Company, and Wind Dancer Productions. He took his first trip back to Cuba in December, 1999, followed in rapid succession by two more visits to his homeland. Machado says he has 435

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“No, nobility has to do with caring about the ugly things, seeing trash and loving it. It has to do with compassion, not table manners. It has to do with thought, not what people think about you.” —from Broken Eggs

always been at the mercy of politics. Critics say his works show his conflicts: capitalism versus communism, heterosexuality versus homosexuality, Cuban identity versus Cuban American identity. Machado has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, the Mark Taper Forum, The Public Theater, and the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. He has headed Columbia University’s graduate playwriting program in the School of Arts since 1997 and has been an artistic associate of the Cherry Lane Alternative, the Off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre’s nonprofit wing. Machado received a 1995 National Theater Artist Residency to be playwright in residence at Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum. He has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the City of Los Angeles for his works. He received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for a one-act play at Ensemble Studio Theatre. He first debuted When the Sea Drowns in Sand at the twenty-fifth annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. It has since been rewritten and performed as the autobiographical Havana Is Waiting. — Debra D. Andrist Learn More Conde, Yvonne. Operation Peter Pan: The Untold Exodus of Fourteen Thousand Forty-eight Cuban Children. New York: Routledge, 1999. A history of the Peter Pan Project, written by one of the children who was sent to the United States. 436

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Muñoz, Elias Miguel. “Of Small Conquests and Big Victories: Gender Constructs in The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa.” In The Americas Review 20, no. 2 (Summer, 1992): 105-111. Examines the treatment of sexual roles in Cuban society in the work of Machado and other Cuban American dramatists. Ortiz, Ricardo L. “Culpa and Capital: Nostalgic Addictions of Cuban Exile.” Yale Journal of Criticism 10, no. 1 (Spring, 1997): 63-84. Analyzes the treatment of coffee and its relationship to Cuban exiles in the United States in Machado’s The Floating Island Plays; compares this treatment to works by other Cuban American playwrights. Torres, María de Los Angeles. The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the United States and the Promise of a Better Future. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Torres, one of the children sent to the United States, chronicles the history of the Peter Pan Project.

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Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis Brazilian novelist Born: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; June 21, 1839 Died: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; September 29, 1908 long fiction: Resurreicão, 1872; A mão e a luva, 1874 (The Hand and the Glove, 1970); Helena, 1876; Yayá Garcia, 1878 (English translation, 1977); Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, 1881 (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, 1951; better known as Epitaph of a Small Winner, 1952); Quincas Borba, 1891 (Philosopher or Dog?, 1954; also as The Heritage of Quincas Borba, 1954); Dom Casmurro, 1899 (English translation, 1953); Esaú e Jacob, 1904 (Esau and Jacob, 1965); Memorial de Ayres, 1908 (Counselor Ayres’ Memorial, 1972). short fiction: Contos fluminenses, 1870; Histórias da meia-noite, 1873; Papéis avulsos, 1882; Histórias sem data, 1884; Várias histórias, 1896; Histórias românticas, 1937; The Psychiatrist, and Other Stories, 1963; What Went on at the Baroness’, 1963; The Devil’s Church, and Other Stories, 1977. drama: Desencantos, pb. 1861; Quase ministro, pb. 1864; Os deuses de casaca, pb. 1866; Tu só, tu, puro amor, pb. 1880; Teatro, pb. 1910. poetry: Crisálidas, 1864; Falenas, 1870; Americanas, 1875; Poesias completas, 1901. nonfiction: Páginas recolhidas (contos ensaios, crônicas), 1899; Relíquias de Casa Velha (contos crônicas, comêdias), 1906; Crítica, 1910; A semana, 1910; Crítica por Machado de Assis, 1924; Crítica literária, 1937; Crítica teatral, 1937; Correspondência, 1938. miscellaneous: Outras relíquias, 1908; Obra completa, 1959.

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lifelong resident of Rio de Janeiro, Joaquim Machado de Assis (zhwah-KEEM mah-SHAH-doh thay ah-SEES) was

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

the son of a Portuguese mother and a mulatto father. Despite humble origins, epilepsy, and a speech defect, this self-taught intellectual not only attained the highest civil service position open to him but also founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters and served as its president until his death in 1908. While still living, Machado de Assis saw himself acknowledged as Brazil’s greatest writer. At the time of his death, in 1908, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was revered as Brazil’s most important and influential man of letters, a distinction many critics feel he deserves. An innovator in such areas as the use of irony and of self-conscious but unreliable narrator/protagonists, Machado de Assis was instrumental in leading Brazilian literature toward an appreciation of both technical sophistication and authenticity of expression. Although he did outstanding work in all the literary genres, including poetry, drama, translation, and critical theory, it was in narrative—the novel and short-story forms especially—that he achieved his greatest successes. His extraordinary work Epitaph of a Small Winner can, for example, be regarded as the first modern novel of either North or South America, while the text widely held to be his supreme achievement, Dom Casmurro, ranks as one of the outstanding novels of its time. Perhaps even more brilliant as a writer of short fiction, however, Machado de Assis is credited with having originated the modern short-story

There went my father and my holiday! A day away from school without any fun! No, it was not a day but eight, eight days of mourning, during which the thought of returning to school sometimes occurred to me. Between condolence visits, my mother cried and sewed the mourning clothes. I cried too. . . . —from The Holiday (trans. William L. Grossman)

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“Midnight Mass” The narrator of “Midnight Mass,” Mr. Nogueira, is of indeterminate age as he tells his tale, but he was a young man of seventeen when the events occurred. A country boy, he has come to Rio de Janeiro to stay with Mr. Menezes, a notary whose first wife was Nogueira’s cousin, in order to prepare for his college entrance examinations. The Menezes household is composed of the notary, his wife, Madame Conceiçao, her mother, and two female slaves. Nogueira spends some months living quietly with the family, which he refers to as old-fashioned. The only exception to the nightly routine of a ten o’clock bedtime is the weekly visit that Menezes makes to the theater. Nogueira would like to join him, as he has never been to the theater, but he discovers that going to the theater is a euphemism that allows Menezes to spend one night a week with a married woman who is separated from her husband. Conceiçao accepts her husband’s mistreatment of her passively, as she seems to respond to everything.

form in Brazil, where tales such as “The Psychiatrist,” “Midnight Mass,” “A Singular Event,” “The Companion,” and “Dona Paula” are still judged to be masterpieces of his laconic, metaphoric art. To some modern readers it may appear lamentable that Machado de Assis’s works bear neither overt references to his racial heritage nor arguably even oblique ones. In this regard the Brazilian mulatto will be seen to be fully integrated with the concerns and priorities of the European-leaning dominant bourgeois society in late nineteenth century Brazil. Nevertheless, Machado de Assis wrote on the fringes of “polite” society in a way that did not specifically derive from race, although a sense of social inferiority may well have contributed to his develop440


The events of the story occur on Christmas Eve, which coincides with the notary’s weekly theater outing. Nogueira has remained in the city to see the special midnight Mass. He sits reading in the silent house when Conceiçao appears, dressed in her negligee. Nogueira notes that she does not appear to have slept. A conversation ensues, and Nogueira gradually realizes that the passive, thirty-year-old wife of Menezes is a very beautiful woman. The next day, Conceiçao expresses no interest in him, despite the seeming intimacy of the previous evening. He goes home a few days later. When he returns to Rio in March, the notary has died of apoplexy, and Conceiçao has moved to another district and married her husband’s apprentice clerk. In “Midnight Mass,” Machado tells two stories in one: a sketch of the period, and the story of a woman who eventually finds happiness despite her present circumstances. Although each detail alone seems unambiguous, their accumulation results in an ambiguous narrative that leaves both the narrator and the reader in a quandary, wondering if Conceiçao was unfaithful, if her husband did die of shock, why Conceiçao married so soon after being widowed, why she moved, and if she was pregnant. — Linda Ledford-Miller

ment of a cynical and biting stance toward the higher spiritual aspirations of the socially dominant Brazilian of his day. Specifically, this stance can be seen in his critical analyses of the ambiguities of the human soul (his “Jamesian” quality) and in his dissection of the pious self-sufficiency of the ignorant bourgeoisie (his “Flaubertian” and “Tolstoian” qualities). Like many of the great realists, Machado de Assis lends himself to a Lukacsian or Marxist analysis. His works bespeak, beneath the surface of the comings and goings of polite, ordered society, the tremendous conflicts, passions, and irreconcilable tensions of a society that fragments human experience and strives to metaphorize, in terms of a myth of spiritual transcendence, humans’ carnal and materialistic nature. The patterned texture of an or441


dered society remains permanently at odds with fundamental aspects of the human soul which it chooses to ignore or metaphorize. — David W. Foster, updated by Earl E. Fitz Learn More Caldwell, Helen. Machado de Assis: The Brazilian Master and His Novels. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. A concise survey of Machado de Assis’s nine novels and his various narrative techniques. Also includes discussions of his primary themes, a useful bibliography, and some comments on his plays, poems, and short stories. Dixon, Paul. Retired Dreams: “Dom Casmurro,” Myth and Modernity. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1989. Describes how Machado de Assis cultivated a radically new style of writing, featuring ambiguity as the most “realistic” aspect of language. Dixon also suggests that Machado de Assis was critical of his society’s patriarchal codes and that, as evidenced in the relationship between the novel’s two major characters (Bento and Capitu), he implies the virtues inherent in a more matriarchal approach to sociopolitical organization. Fitz, Earl E. Machado de Assis. Boston: Twayne, 1989. The first English-language book to examine all aspects of Machado de Assis’s writing. Includes information on his life, his place in Brazilian and world literature, his style, and his themes. Graham, Richard, ed. Machado de Assis: Reflections on a Brazilian Master Writer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. Part of the Critical Reflections on Latin America series, this volume has essays by John Gledson, Daphne Patai, and Sidney Chalhoub. Jackson, K. David. “The Brazilian Short Story.” In The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. Vol. 3, edited by Robert González Echevarria and Enrique Pupo-Walker. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Discusses Machado de Assis’s technique of suggestion and implication within an ironic frame of reference. Suggests that Machado de Assis’s humor and irony underline the futility of human conflict in a world in which the nature of reality is illusory. 442


Maia Neto, José Raimundo. Machado de Assis, the Brazilian Pyrrhonian. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1994. Part 1 explores Machado de Assis’s first phase (18611878)—from writing essays to stories to his first novels. Part 2 concentrates on his second phase (1879-1908), with separate chapters on The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Dom Casmurro, and later fiction. Nunes, Maria Luisa. The Craft of an Absolute Winner: Characterization and Narratology in the Novels of Machado de Assis. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. An excellent study of Machado de Assis’s novelistic techniques, characterization, and primary themes. Argues that the essence of Machado de Assis’s genius, like that of all great writers, lies in his singular ability to create powerful and compelling characters. Schwarz, Roberto. A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism: Machado de Assis. Translated by John Gledson. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. A Marxist analysis of Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, including an examination of the novel’s style and its historical and sociological aspects.

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Eduardo Mallea Argentine novelist and short-story writer Born: Bahía Blanca, Argentina; August 14, 1903 Died: Buenos Aires, Argentina; November 12, 1982 long fiction: Nocturno europeo, 1935; Fiesta en noviembre, 1938 (Fiesta in November, 1942); La bahía de silencio, 1940 (The Bay of Silence, 1944); Todo verdor perecerá, 1941 (All Green Shall Perish, 1966); El vínculo, Los Rembrandtes, La rosa de Cernobbio, 1946 (novellas); Los enemigos del alma, 1950; Chaves, 1953 (English translation, 1966); Simbad, 1957 (novella); El resentimiento, 1966 (three novellas); La penúltima puerta, 1969 (novella); Gabriel Andaral, 1971 (novella); Triste piel del universo, 1971 (novella). short fiction: Cuentos para una inglesa desesperada, 1926; La ciudad junto al río inmóvil, 1936; La sala de espera, 1953; Posesión, 1957; La barca de hielo, 1967. nonfiction: Conocimiento y expresión de la Argentina, 1935; Historia de una pasión argentina, 1937 (History of an Argentine Passion, 1983); El sayal y la púrpura, 1946; Notas de un novelista, 1954; La vida blanca, 1960; Las Travesías, 1961-1962; La guerra interior, 1963; Poderío de la novela, 1965. miscellaneous: Obras completas, 1961, 1965 (2 volumes); La red, 1968.

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descendant of the diplomat, author, and educator Sarmiento, Eduardo Mallea (eh-DWAHR-doh mah-YAH-ah) was born on August 14, 1903, in desolate, wind-swept Bahía Blanca, Argentina, the setting for much of his writing. After his primary instruction by an Australian woman, his physician father took him to Buenos Aires, where he studied law until the sale of some children’s stories turned him to literature as a career. Some of his short stories were published in journals in the 1920’s. In 1926 his first collection of stories, the fantastic and

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frantic Cuentos para una inglesa desesperada (stories for a desperate Englishwoman), opened the way for a voyage to Europe and brought him in 1931 the literary editorship of La nación, Argentina’s most influential newspaper, in Buenos Aires. A lecture trip to Italy later resulted in Nocturno europeo, an example of his technique of using a slim fictional plot to tie together his ideas. It won for him the first of many literary prizes, which included the Primer Premio Nacional de Letras in 1945, the Forti Glori Prize in 1968, and the Gran Premio Nacional de las Artes in 1970. Mallea married Helena Muñóz Larreta in 1944. His “History of an Argentine Passion,” probably his most important essay, is the cornerstone of his credo. It includes many 445

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Chaves A brief, intense character study of a withdrawn sawmill worker whose taciturnity is the result of profound grief and frustration, Chaves (1953) concentrates upon its grave, aloof, self-sufficient protagonist, who sometimes seems almost an allegorical figure. His refusal to socialize and participate in the pettiness of the primitive society of the sawmill community in Argentina’s southwestern mountains arouses hostility and alienates him. Although he is cast as an outsider, Chaves’s behavior is not calculated arrogance or intellectual withdrawal, for he is rather a simple man. Chaves’s psychological formation is reconstructed from flashbacks. Born, like the author, in Bahía Blanca, he grew up with nature and the ocean, amid sand dunes, without developing ambition or a competitive spirit. A change ensues when he meets the woman who becomes his wife, Pura (whose name means “pure”), and decides to compromise his ethical values to support her better: He sells worthless real estate while they live in a rented room. A daughter born to the couple dies

autobiographical elements, and its hero Adrian seeks relief for his tormented soul in the Confessions of Saint Augustine and in Spanish mysticism. Mallea’s confessed admiration for Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka explains Mallea’s The Bay of Silence, the work which firmly established him as a modern novelist who expresses philosophical implications in a pungently lyrical style and who excels in descriptions of the city. The novel describes Martin Tregua as a student in Buenos Aires and portrays his relationship in Europe with the disillusioned, frustrated, married Gloria, with whom he finds solace. In Fiesta in November Mallea presents three complicated and temperamental women in a literary feat inspired by the execution of the 446

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at age four, underlining their failure and inability to conquer the sterile, dead environment. Moving from the hills of Córdoba to Tucumán, they settle in a small town where they live uneventfully for years, until fate intervenes and Pura dies of typhoid fever. Chaves’s last attempt to communicate with other human beings is part of the futile effort to save Pura, but his recourse to the long-unused spoken word is to no avail. His silence deepens, and coworkers’ attempts to force him to speak nearly degenerate into violence. Rescued by the foreman from an attack by coworkers, Chaves responds to his benefactor’s request that he terminate his alienation with one word, “No.” He is the existential outsider, a prototype of the hero so popular among French existentialists during the 1940’s. Some critics have suggested parallels between Chaves and Meursault in Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1942). Both refuse to play by the rules and as a result become pariahs, but with certain differences. At the end of The Stranger, Meursault rises to denounce man’s inhumanity to man and to point to the fact that humanity is eagerly awaiting his death. Chaves, by contrast, refuses to speak, and his alienation is prolonged beyond the novel’s end because he is not released by death. — Genaro J. Pérez

Spanish poet Federico García Lorca at the outbreak of the Civil War. Between chapters about the useless rich of Buenos Aires, fearing suppression of liberty and thought, are sections of another story about soldiers murdering the liberal poet for having different ideas. Stefan Zweig insisted that Mallea’s All Green Shall Perish should be published in Europe, and José Lins do Rego translated it into Portuguese for Brazilian readers. Ernest Hemingway and others recognized Mallea’s skill with words and ideas by including one of his representative works in the anthology The Best of the World (1950). Mallea tried to create a style typically Argentine; his portrayal of his characters, solitary souls in pain 447

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This was the thousandth time that I had seen you. You had never seen me, except vaguely. You did not see me now until you raised your eyes in a distant way, realized that the florist was busy attending to me, and smiled at your own discourtesy. There was a harsh and blighted look in your eyes, even in your smile. —from The Bay of Silence (trans. Stuart Edgar Grummon)

seeking freedom and self-expression, reveals his patriotic belief that his native land is a paradise even if the inhabitants possess many weaknesses. — Emil Volek Learn More Chapman, Arnold. “Terms of Spiritual Isolation in Eduardo Mallea.” Modern Language Forum 37 (1952): 21-27. An insightful study of Mallea’s use of metaphor. Dudgeon, Patrick. Eduardo Mallea: A Personal Study of His Work. Buenos Aires: Agonia, 1949. Brief but useful for its discussions of Fiesta in November and The Bay of Silence. Lewald, H. Ernest. Eduardo Mallea. Boston: Twayne, 1977. A sound introduction covering Mallea’s formative period, his handling of passion, his cosmopolitan spirit, his national cycle, and his last fictional works. Includes chronology, notes, and annotated bibliography. Lichtblau, Myron I. Introduction to History of an Argentine Passion, by Eduardo Mallea. Translated by Lichtblau. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1983. This introduction to the first English translation of a Mallea essay provides an excellent overview of his place in Spanish American fiction. Lichtblau includes an excellent bibliography. Polt, John H. The Writings of Eduardo Mallea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. Polt discusses Mallea’s essays and fiction through the mid-1950’s. A thorough study. 448

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Shaw, Donald L. Introduction to Todo verdor perecerá, by Eduardo Mallea. Edited by Shaw. Oxford, England: Pergamon Press, 1968. Cited as an outstanding interpretation. _______. “Narrative Technique in Mallea’s La bahía de silencio.” Symposium 20 (1966): 50-55. One of the few studies of this kind in English. Stabb, Martin S. In Quest of Identity: Patterns in the Spanish American Essay of Ideas, 1890-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967. Although Stabb devotes a section mainly to Mallea’s essays, his comments provide helpful background for the fiction as well.

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José Julián Martí Cuban poet and revolutionary Born: Havana, Cuba; January 28, 1853 Died: Dos Ríos, Cuba; May 19, 1895 poetry: Ismaelillo, 1882; Versos sencillos, 1891 (Simple Verses, 1997); Versos libres, 1913; José Martí, Major Poems: A Bilingual Edition, 1982; The Complete Poems of José Martí, 2003. drama: Amor con amor se paga, pr. 1875; Patria y libertad: Drama indio, pr. 1877; Adúltera, pr. 1936; Abdala, pr. 1940. long fiction: Amistad funesta, 1911. nonfiction: El presidio político en Cuba, 1871; La república española ante la revolución cubana, 1873; The America of José Martí: Selected Writings, 1954; Diarios, 1956; Diario de campaña, 1962; Del 95 al 62: Darios de Martí, el declaración de la Habana, 1964; Inside the Monster: Writings on the United States and American Imperialism, 1975; Our America: Writings on Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence, 1977; On Education: Articles on Educational Theory and Pedagogy, and Writings for Children from the Age of Gold, 1979; On Art and Literature: Critical Writings, 1982; Political Parties and Elections in the United States, 1989; José Martí, Reader: Writings on the Americas, 1999; Selected Writings, 2002. miscellaneous: Obras completas, 1963-1973 (28 volumes).

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osé Martí (hoh-SAY mar-TEE) has become known worldwide for his wide-ranging abilities and monumental contributions to Latin American literature and history. His unswerving devotion to the cause of Cuban independence from Spain and his heroic death in battle have made him a much-revered symbol of Latin American independence. Both of Martí’s parents were from Spain, and even in childhood Martí’s strong sense of his identity as a Cuban and his resentment toward Spain’s colonial rule made for tense family relations. This situation was exempli-

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fied by Martí’s 1862 trip to the province of Matanzas, where he and his father watched hundreds of Africans arriving as slaves. That same day, Martí observed a slave who had been lynched. Horrified, the nine-year-old vowed to spend his life fighting for justice. He enrolled in school in Havana and soon met Fermín Valdés Domínguez; the two would remain best friends for the rest of their lives. Also crucial to Martí’s development was the influence of his principal and mentor, the poet Rafael María Mendive, who helped pay for Martí’s education and encouraged his student’s political and artistic penchants. By the time he turned fifteen, Martí had published several poems, including the dramatic poem Abdala, which appeared in the first and only issue of La Patria Libre (the free homeland) on January 23, 1869. The newspaper, which Martí founded, was created to take advantage of the single month of free press (January 9February 11, 1869) granted to the Cubans by their Spanish rulers. The play, in which an East African soldier dies while fighting for his nation’s independence, introduces two of the most dominant themes in Martí’s work: the evils of colonialism and the

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Simple Verses Many readers will recognize the first poem from Martí’s Versos sencillos (1891; Simple Verses, 1997) as the lyrics from the popular song “Guantanamera,” and the book’s collective influence has been widely acknowledged as fundamental to the canon of Latin American Modernist literature. Martí was the consummate Cuban patriot, and Simple Verses provides a window into the author’s struggle to reconcile the worlds of poetry and politics and to locate his own role in the developing world of postcolonial Latin America. Even in the book’s first lines, Martí hints at this sense of inner conflict, of being torn in more than one direction: I am an honest man From where the palms grow; Before I die I want my soul To shed its poetry. I come from everywhere, To everywhere I’m bound: An art among the arts, A mountain among mountains.

conflict created when devotion to country runs counter to family expectations and obligations. It should be noted that even during this month of free press all mentions of slavery—legal in Cuba until 1886—were prohibited, and so Martí’s use of African characters made a particularly bold statement. In late 1869, a police search of Valdés Domínguez’s home uncovered a letter signed by him and Martí accusing a classmate of being disloyal to Mendive and the struggle for independence. Martí was convicted of sedition and sentenced to six years’ hard labor in the rock quarries of Havana’s San Lázaro prison. When he was released in 1870 he was immediately deported to Spain and spent the next three years in Madrid and Saragossa, where 452


Themes of pain and conflict (both inner and exterior) are consistently present in these poems. Martí’s life was full of emotional anguish (his family relations, both with his parents and his wife and son, were generally characterized by geographical and emotional distance) and sickness (as a result of his years of hard labor in a Cuban rock quarry), but his mother had taught him to think of pain as a necessary and even vital force. The influence of this lesson and others are apparent in the folksong-like tone adopted in his verses, distinguishing him from Rubén Darío and other Modernist poets who were more accepting of the movement’s stylistic restrictions. Simple Verses was written in 1890, as Martí recouperated from illness in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. Each poem is numbered, and some deal with individual events in the writer’s life, providing a kind of poetic autobiography. Martí also draws heavily from the natural world, emphasizing Cuba’s lush vegetation and its dramatic, exotic landscapes. However, the most important theme in this volume—and in Martí’s work in general—is the power of poetry and revolution in the creation of a utopian world. Poetry, says Martí, is the tool best suited for the construction of this ideal community; revolution is the act of turning the ideal into reality. — Anna A. Moore

he earned degrees in philosophy and law. Political debate was permitted in Spain, and Martí devoted much of his energies to advocating Cuban independence in the Spanish press. He returned to the Americas in 1874—his family had settled in Mexico—and became an active participant in the Mexican literary scene, writing for the magazine Revista Universal, founding the Alarcón Society, and writing his well-received play Amor con amor se paga (love is repaid with love). He also met (and later married) Carmen Zayas Bazán, the daughter of a fellow Cuban exile. The installation of Porfirio Díaz’s dicatorship forced Martí to leave Mexico in 1876, and though he tried to return to Cuba 453


he found that he could not do so without being recognized. Convinced that the Cuban independence movement still lacked sufficient momentum, Martí and his new wife settled in Guatemala, where Martí taught literature and philosophy. The political climate in Guatemala became inhospitable after only one year, but by this time the Ten Years’ War had ended in Cuba and Martí was able to return in 1879. He found work in a law office, but his continued political outspokenness resulted in another deportation to Spain in late 1879. His wife was frustrated by his political activity, and the pair later separated. Martí would always remain devoted to their son, José Francisco Martí Zayas Bayan, the Ismaelillo to whom Martí’s 1882 book—which many consider to be the earliest example of Modernismo—is dedicated. This exile was not nearly as arduous as the first. After two months, Martí eluded Spanish police and went briefly to Paris before sailing on to New York City. He remained in New York for a full fifteen years—until 1895—as he completed the development of his artistic and political philosophies. For Martí, art and politics cannot be separated: Art is the means through which freedom is achieved, and the struggle for freedom is itself a form of art. Personal relationships, love, and pain are equally fundamental; Martí’s work often reflects the lessons he learned from his mother, who taught her son to bear life’s misfortunes without self-pity.

I know the unfamiliar names Of grasses and of flowers, Of fatal deceptions And exalted sorrows. On darkest nights I’ve seen Rays of the purest splendor Raining upon my head From heavenly beauty. —from “Simple Verses” (trans. Elinor Randall)

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While living in New York, Martí worked as a correspondent for American and Latin American newspapers and completed another book of poems, Versos libres (free verses) that remained unpublished until 1913. This book covers a wider range of subjects than its predecessors and carries a heavier emphasis on death, especially as a metaphor for exile. Fulfillment, Martí says, can only come from a return to his homeland, an idea that is also present in Simple Verses. Martí felt increasingly conflicted about life in the United States through the 1890’s; he valued the freedom America offered but was alarmed by its expansionist policies and overtures toward Cuba. He traveled along the United States’ East Coast in an attempt to inspire a pro-independence movement among Cuban tobacco workers and, while serving as the consul for Uruguay in 1887, he took a public stand against the U.S. Secretary of State James G. Blaine, who wanted to strengthen North American influence by moving Latin American countries onto a silver standard. The foreword to Simple Verses reflects many of these concerns, making the book a valuable contribution to Latin America’s history as well as to its literature. Martí had founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892, and by April of 1895 he was back in Cuba and ready for battle. Appointed to the rank of major general in the Liberating Army, he wrote a letter to the New York Herald explaining the motives behind Cuba’s independence movement before leading his troops into the fighting. He was killed by Spanish soldiers in the battle of Dos Ríos on May 19, 1895, and his already mythic status among Cubans caused his body to be reburied five times before finally coming to rest in Santiago de Cuba. — Anna A. Moore Learn More Belnap, Jeffrey, and Raul Fernandez, eds. José Martí’s “Our America”: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. This volume focuses on Martí’s career as a journalist, concentrating on his belief in the universality of events; namely, that the Cuban struggle for independence was a reflection of a larger global movement towards increased freedom. 455


Laraway, David. “José Martí and the Call of Technology in ‘Amor de ciudad grande.’” MLN 119, no. 2 (March, 2004): 290-302. This article centers on the poem “Amor de ciudad grande,” in which Martí explores the technology of his era and its role in Latin American society. Rabin, Lisa M. “Marble Heroes and Mortal Poets: José Martí’s Dream of Statuary.” Romance Quarterly 47, no. 4 (Fall, 2000): 227-239. A case study of Poem 45 in Martí’s book Simple Verses. Rabin sees this poem, which focuses on a dream about statues, as representative of Martí’s desire to link visual art and politics through poetry. Rodriguez-Luis, Julio, ed. Re-reading José Martí (1853-1895): One Hundred Years Later. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Thoroughly examines Martí’s impact on Latin American literature and statehood and places his writings in a modern context.

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Gabriela Mistral Chilean poet Born: Vicuña, Chile; April 7, 1889 Died: Hempstead, New York; January 10, 1957 Also known as: Lucila Godoy Alcayaga poetry: Desolación, 1922; Ternura, 1924, enlarged 1945; Tala, 1938; Antología, 1941; Lagar, 1954; Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, 1957; Poesías completas, 1958; Poema de Chile, 1967; A Gabriela Mistral Reader, 1993.

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t is speculated that Lucila Godoy Alcayaga’s pen name, Gabriela Mistral (gah-bree-EHL-ah mee-STRAHL), comes from the names of two earlier poets, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral. “Gabriela” also recalls the angel Gabriel and “Mistral,” the Mediterranean wind. Spiritual and natural forces pervade her work, which generally displays the virtues of simplicity and clarity. Long considered a leading poet of Latin America, she saw her international recognition crowned when she became the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945. Mistral came from a humble background. Her father, Jerónimo Godoy, was a village schoolteacher in northern Chile when she was born; he was also known locally as a writer and singer of songs. He abandoned the family when she was three years old. Her childhood was spent in her small town, where she also later attended the local liceo, or high school. Her career as a schoolteacher began early, first by example. Like Mistral’s father, her mother, Petrolina Alcayaga de Molina, was a rural schoolteacher. The future teacher was once expelled from school for having pagan ideas, although she is universally recognized as one of the most spiritual poets of her time. Later she was a student at the pedagogical college at Santiago. Mistral thought of herself primarily as a teacher rather than a poet. Her teaching career began at the age of fifteen, instructing small children in a rural school. Later she became a teacher 457

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in secondary schools. For a short time she was the mentor of young Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, who adopted the pen name of Pablo Neruda and was in 1971 the second Chilean to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1911 Mistral received the post of inspector-general and professor of history at the liceo in Antofagasta. A year later she was appointed inspector and professor of Castilian at the Liceo de los Andes, where she remained for six years. By that time she had achieved some fame for her “Sonetos de la muerte” (“sonnets of death,” appearing in Desolación), which had won first prize in a national contest. The sonnets grew out of her love for a railroad worker, Romelio Ureta. Their love did not end happily; he left her and later shot himself fatally over a financial debt. The sonnets include such imagery as the poet’s taking and walking with the urn containing her love’s ashes, feeling a sense of contentment because no woman now contends with her for him. In another sonnet she asks Christ to forgive the suicide (the kind of thinking that resulted in her expulsion from school) and asserts that only Christ can judge her. Desolación (desolation) was first published in the United States, appropriately at the initiative of students who read her poetry in the classroom. Mistral loved children, but she never married or had any of her own, although she adopted a nephew, Juan Miguel Godoy. Ternura (tenderness), especially, is devoted to the spiritual bond

Little fleece of my flesh that I wove in my womb, little shivering fleece, sleep close to me! The partridge sleeps in the clover hearing its heart beat. My breathing will not wake you. Sleep close to me! —from “Close to Me” (trans. Doris Dana) 458

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and the spiritual greatness of motherhood and childhood. It contains numerous poems that one may call literary works or that may be called lullabies or children’s poems. Children throughout Latin America have sung Mistral’s poems. Ternura also was published at the urging of readers of Mistral’s poetry; Mistral, modest about her art, favored publishing in periodicals. From 1922 to 1924, already famous as a poet and educator, Mistral was in Mexico, at the invitation of the Mexican government, to assist in the reorganization and development of libraries and schools. She also lectured there on Latin American literature. After travel in Europe, she returned to her native Chile to receive many honors. As is common in South American culture, she was given, as a leading author, a series of diplomatic posts abroad. One of her assignments was as the Chilean delegate to the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations. She also served in 459

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Tala Tala (1938) was compiled as a gesture to the Spanish children uprooted during the Spanish Civil War (19361939). Mistral was disappointed and ashamed that Latin America had not appeared to share her grief for the plight of these homeless children, and the proceeds from the sale of this volume went to the children’s camps. The title of the book refers to the felling of trees and applies to both the poems themselves and the purpose for which the author compiled them. The limbs are cut from the living trunk and offered as a gift, a part of oneself. From within the poet, there remains the assumption of the growth of a new forest. In Tala, happiness, hope, and peace flow in songs that speak of the beauties of America, and Mistral humanizes, spiritualizes, and orders the creatures of the continent around the presence of man. She gathers all things together, animate and inanimate, nourishes them like children, and sings of them in love, wonder, thanksgiving, and happiness. Far from America, she has felt the nostal-

her country’s consular service at a number of cities, including Madrid, Lisbon, Genoa, and Nice. In addition, she taught for some months in the United States, at Barnard College and at Middlebury College. She worked diligently at these jobs. By the time she received the Nobel Prize her fame had been spread by way of the many translations of her work into other languages. The proceeds from Tala (felling of trees), which contains poems honoring the natural beauty of her native region in Chile, were donated to the cause of children left homeless by the Spanish Civil War. From 1946 to 1948 the poet lived in Santa Barbara, California. Then, at the invitation of Mexican president Miguel Alemán Valdés, she lived for two years in Mexico. In the early 1950’s 460

Gabriela Mistral gia of the foreigner for home, and hopes to inspire the youth of her native soil. Mistral sees Latin America as one great people. She employs the sun and the Andes Mountains as binding physical elements, and she calls for a similar spiritual kinship. She believes that governments should emphasize education, love, respect for manual labor, and identification with the lower classes. She declares that there is much in the indigenous past that merits inclusion in the present, and invokes pre-Columbian history with nostalgia, feeling remorse for the loss of the Indian’s inheritance and his acceptance of destiny. Maternal longing is the mainspring of Mistral’s many lullabies and verses for children. The other constant, implicitly present in all the poems of Tala, is God. She approaches God along paths of suffering, self-discipline, and a deep understanding of the needs of her fellow people. In God, she seeks peace from her suffering, comfort in her loneliness, and perfection. Her ability to humanize all things grows from her desire to find God everywhere. Thus these objects and the wonder derived from them infuse religion into the poet’s creation. Her imagery derives from the contemplation of nature and its relationship with the divine. — Alfred W. Jensen

she served as the Chilean consul at Naples. She had, by a special law, become a “lifetime consul” for her native country wherever she chose to live. Lagar (winepress) includes some of the grief she felt after the suicides of her friends, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and his wife, and of her adopted son. From 1953 until her death from cancer, she lived in the United States. — Eric Howard Learn More Arce de Vázquez, Margot. Gabriela Mistral: The Poet and Her Work. Translated by Helene Masslo Anderson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Biography and critical study of Mistral’s life and poetry. Includes bibliographical references. 461

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Agosín, Marjorie, ed. Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. Collection of essays examining Mistral’s legacy and how her work continues to define Latin America. Brevard, Lisa Pertillar. Womansaints: The Saintly Portrayal of Select African-American and Latina Cultural Heroines. New Orleans, La.: University Press of the South, 2002. Brevard analyzes the public images of Mistral, Frida Kahlo, and other women, drawing parallels between the stereotypes of Latinas and African American women. Castleman, William J. Beauty and the Mission of the Teacher: The Life of Gabriela Mistral of Chile, Teacher, Poetess, Friend of the Helpless, Nobel Laureate. Smithtown, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1982. A biography of Mistral and her life as a teacher, poet, and diplomat. Includes a bibliography of Mistral’s writing. Fiol-Matta, Licia. A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriel Mistral. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Explains how Mistral became a symbol of motherhood to Latin Americans and what her image, life, and poems say about race, gender, and the sexual politics of her time. Marchant, Elizabeth. Critical Acts: Latin American Women and Cultural Criticism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. This reevaluation of Latin American women writers during the first half of the twentieth century includes a chapter about Mistral’s representation of nation and motherhood. Marchant reconsiders some representative poems, focusing on the dichotomy between Mistral’s theories and practices and the female intellectual’s alienation from the public sphere. While Mistral refused a traditional societal role for herself, she advocated it for her readership. Mistral, Gabriela. This America of Ours: The Letters of Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo. Edited and translated by Elizabeth Horan and Doris Meyer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. The correspondence between Mistral and Argentine writer Ocampo provides a glimpse into their private lives and their opinions of the political and intellectual climate of their times. The appendix contains essays by the two writers. 462

Nicholasa Mohr Puerto Rican fiction writer and visual artist Born: New York, New York; November 1, 1935 short fiction: El Bronx Remembered: A Novella and Stories, 1975; In Nueva York, 1977; Rituals of Survival: A Woman’s Portfolio, 1985; The Song of El Coquí, and Other Tales of Puerto Rico, 1995; A Matter of Pride, and Other Stories, 1997. long fiction: Nilda, 1973 (juvenile); Felita, 1979 (juvenile); Going Home, 1986 (sequel to Felita); All for the Better: A Story of El Barrio, 1992; Isabel’s New Mom, 1993; The Magic Shell, 1994. nonfiction: Growing Up Inside the Sanctuary of My Imagination, 1994. radio play: Inside the Monster, 1981. television play: Aquí y ahora, 1975.

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he daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants, Nicholasa Mohr (nih-koh-LAH-sah mohr) documents life in New York City’s barrios. Mohr examines the Puerto Rican experience from the perspective of girls and young women. Her female characters face multiple social problems associated with the re-

“You know he went to P.R. to get a wife, don’t you? Because he knew he’s not gonna find nothing like that here, right? My mother says he works her to death. You know, they could use some more help with the business he’s got, but. . . .” Lillian shrugged. “Poor Lali, she’s a little jibarita, a hick, from the mountains, so I guess to her this is living.” —from “I Never Even Seen My Father” 463

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El Bronx Remembered Nicholasa Mohr’s El Bronx Remembered (1975) is a collection of short stories depicting life in a Puerto Rican barrio in New York City during the 1960’s and 1970’s, in which Mohr portrays Puerto Rican urban life by concentrating on subjects of particular importance to young adults. Her narratives do not offer a denunciation of the troubled lives of immigrants and children of immigrants. Instead, her stories bring forward voices of female characters of several age groups and social backgrounds. Mohr writes from autobiographical memories. In her hands, the barrio is a strong presence that affects the lives of characters in myriad ways. City life and traditional Puerto Rican family values are set against each other, producing the so-called Nuyorican culture, or Puerto-Ricanin-New-York culture. The clashes within that hybrid culture are the thematic center of Mohr’s short stories. The introduction to the collection sets a strong historical context for the stories. The 1940’s saw an increase in Puerto Rican migration to New York, changing the ethnic constitution of the city, especially of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the South Bronx. El Bronx, as it is called by the Puerto Ricans, became home to new generations of Puerto Rican immigrants. The center of Nuyorican culture, El Bronx challenges the Nuyorican characters in their struggle to survive in a world of rapid economic and technological changes. The short stories in El Bronx Remembered speak openly about struggles with linguistic and other cultural barriers and with racist attitudes within institutions. Mohr’s stories, however, attempt to go beyond social criticism. Puerto Rican characters challenge such obstacles, and although some characters succumb to tragedy because they are ill prepared to face adversity, others around them survive by learning from the plight of the weak. — Rafael Ocasio

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strictions imposed upon women by Latino culture. The struggle for sexual equality makes Mohr’s literature central to Latina feminism. Mohr’s characters are an integral part of her realistic portrayal of life in a barrio. The parallels between her characters and her experience are evident. Nilda Ramírez, for example, is a nine-year-old Puerto Rican girl who comes of age during World War II. She also becomes an orphan and is separated from her immediate family. There are close parallels between these events and those of Mohr’s life. In other stories, girls must also face social adversity, racism, and chauvinistic attitudes, and they must do so alone. Gays also frequently appear in her work. Gays and girls or young women (especially those who have little or no family) have often been subjected to mistreatment in the male-dominated Puerto Rican culture. Mohr, a graphic artist and painter, studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1955 to 1959. Her advocacy to the social underclass is visible in her visual art, which includes elements of graffiti. Her use of graffiti in her art attracted the attention of a publisher who had acquired several of her paintings. Believing that Mohr had a story to tell, the publisher convinced her to write a short autobiographical piece on growing up Puerto Rican in New York. Many changes later, that piece became Nilda, her first novel, which has earned several prizes. Mohr has also drawn pictures for some of her literary work. New York City is as important to Mohr’s writing as her Puerto Rican characters. The city, with its many barrios, provides a lively background to her stories. Her short-story collections El Bronx Remembered and In Nueva York stress the characters’ relationship to New York. Mohr’s work can be described as cross-cultural, being a careful and artistic portrait of Puerto Rican culture in New York City. — Rafael Ocasio Learn More Delgado, Teresa. “Prophesy Freedom: Puerto Rican Women’s Literature as a Source for Latina Feminist Theology.” In A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice, edited 465

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by María Pilar Aquino, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodríguez. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Compares the treatment of spirituality and its relationship to feminist theology in short stories by Mohr, Judith Ortiz Coffer, Esmeralda Santiago, and Rosario Ferré. Hernandez, Carmen Dolores. Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997. Mohr is interviewed in this collection of interviews with Puerto Rican writers who live in the United States and write in English. The writers discuss their lives, the experience of living in both the American and Puerto Rican cultures, and their literary tradition. Mohr, Nicholasa. “An Interview with Author Nicholasa Mohr.” Interview by Nyra Zarnowski. The Reading Teacher 45, no. 2 (October, 1991): 106. Rivera, Carmen S. Kissing the Mango Tree: Puerto Rican Women Rewriting American Literature. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 2002. One of the chapters is an analysis of Mohr’s work, locating it within the framework of feminist theory and literature. Includes a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Sanchez-Gonzalez, Lisa. Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Mohr is one of the writers discussed in this comprehensive survey of literature written by Puerto Ricans living in the United States.

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Alejandro Morales Mexican American novelist and short-story writer Born: Montebello, California; October 14, 1944 long fiction: Caras viejas y vino nuevo, 1975 (Old Faces and New Wine, 1981; also known as Barrio on the Edge, 1998); La verdad sin voz, 1979 (Death of an Anglo, 1988); Reto en el paraíso, 1983; The Brick People, 1988; The Rag Doll Plagues, 1992.

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lejandro Morales (ah-lay-HAHN-droh moh-RAL-ehs) is a leading Chicano writer and professor at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Born in Montebello, California (locally considered “East L.A.”), Morales grew up in a secure and loving working-class home, though in the midst of a more turbulent barrio. Witnessing the gang fights, drug deals, homelessness, and chaos on the streets of his neighborhood while still in high school, Morales decided to become a writer who would chronicle his community. He recorded his neighborhood experiences in his journals and then set out for college, first to earn a B.A. from California State University, Los Angeles, and then an M.A. (1971) and Ph.D. (1975) in Spanish from Rutgers University. Morales became a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, with an appointment in film studies at UCI, where he teaches courses on Latin American literature. He married Rohde Teaze on December 16, 1967, and they had two children, Alessandra Pilar and Gregory Stewart. After finishing his Ph.D., Morales pursued publication of his first novel, Old Faces and New Wine, which was based on his youthful journal writings. Offers from American publishing companies proved elusive because of his challenging, experimental prose style and because the journals were initially written in Spanish. His early fiction reflects Morales’s anger at the exploitation of his parents, who worked in manufacturing, his despair 467

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The Rag Doll Plagues The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) is a collection of stories that offer an absorbing panoramic view of the continuing encounter of European and Native American and of English- and Spanish-speaking cultures in the Americas. It is divided into three books. In book 1, Gregorio Revueltas, sent by his king to improve health conditions in seventeenth century Mexico, encounters a plague that threatens to depopulate the colony and weaken Spain’s empire. Revolted by the primitive savagery and amorality of the colonials, Revueltas nevertheless grows to care for them and eventually sees himself as a Mexican. Important to this transformation is his vision of two men who often appear to guide his efforts. In book 2, a young California doctor, Gregory Revueltas, falls in love with Sandra Spear, a hemophiliac actress. As a result of a transfusion, she develops AIDS during the first years after its identification. Seeking help, he returns with her to Old Mexico, where he and Sandra rediscover the ancient Mexican/Indian spiritual traditions that help her to think of death as a positive transformation, traditions that seem verified in Gregory’s guiding visions of his ancestor, Gregorio. Book 3 takes place at the end of the twenty-first century in Lamex, an extrapolated administrative region that comprises most of western Mexico and the southwestern United States. Gregory Revueltas, state doctor, deals with frequent plagues that erupt from centers of organic pollution that have become living entities. He discovers that Mexicans from the highly polluted Mexico City area have developed a genetic mutation that makes their blood, given in transfusion, a cure for most lung ailments. He too is led by the visionary presence of his ancestor, Gregorio. At the end of this book, Revueltas, as narrator, reflects upon the multiple ironies of Mexicans’ new place in American civilization. — Terry Heller

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over the conditions of the barrio, and his struggles against the racism, subtle and overt, he experienced in the academic world early in his teaching career. The result is an arresting prose style; readers of Morales’s early fiction have to work to make connections between events and their meanings and must also learn to comprehend the peculiar dialect he constructs to describe his subject. Often criticized by reviewers, especially for the way he bends both Spanish and English, Morales has written substantial literature that, because it is not easily accessible, has received less attention than other Mexican American literature of his generation. Morales wrote two more novels in Spanish, but then, seeking a wider audience in the United States, he wrote The Brick People and The Rag Doll Plagues in English. The critical success of these two works has positioned Morales as a leading Chicano novelist. Since the late 1980’s, he has become a noted spokesman for Chicano writers—and Chicano culture—writing reviews and essays on Mexican American literature and Latino films and conducting interviews with other Chicano writers and poets. Besides his stylistic innovations, Morales’s early publications demonstrate his interest in local history and biography. For example, his most popular novel, The Brick People, is based on the lives of his parents, who emigrated to California from Mexico and lived and worked at the Simmons Brick Plant in Pasadena, California. The Brick People chronicles the emigration to California of an entire generation of Mexican Americans at the turn of the twentieth century and describes how their labor helped build the growing metropolis of Los Angeles in the early 1930’s. It narrates the Mexican laborers’ exploitation by the paternalistic brick manufacturer. In interviews, public conversations, and symposia, Morales is fond of describing the Simmons brick, which graces the landscaping of his Southern California home, remarking that, like the brick, the lives and labors of Mexican Americans are embedded in the history and geography of California. Morales’s later works, such as The Rag Doll Plagues, evince a strong interest in science, medicine, and technology. In these works, plots revolve around technological change and the effects of science on social evolution. This turn toward science 469

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Arcadia made her decision. “Abel Stearns, you are the ugliest man I have ever seen. I will marry you and I will be yours to the last moment of your life.” Stearns’s broken lips formed a smile. He kissed her hand and went off full of excitement to explore the Bandini estate. —from “Cara de caballo”

and its social implications reflects Morales’s interest in how history is shaped and recorded and how it thus guides the present and future. Furthermore, writing about science and technology gives Morales a metaphorical language for describing the ongoing evolution of Mexican American culture, as Mexican Americans, or Chicanos, increasingly integrate with Anglos, Asian Americans, and African Americans, especially in California. In Morales’s allegorical fiction is a mixture of two compelling literary styles which reflect both his realism and his optimism. A gritty depiction of the racism, oppression, and violence that afflict the poor and minority cultures of America sits side by side on the page with fantastic or “magically real” interventions such as ghosts and the mythic powers of culture. Morales’s continuing experimentation reflects his often stated devotion to developing his mastery of the craft of writing. — Dean Franco and Adrienne Pilon Learn More Gurpegui, José Antonio, ed. Alejandro Morales: Fiction Past, Present, Future Perfect. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Review/Press, 1996. Comprising essays on Morales’s fiction, this collection includes biographical background, an interview, an essay by Morales, and family photos. Essays are in Spanish and English. Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl. “Rancho Mexicana: USA Under Siege.” In Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal 470

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Discourse. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Set in the context of a longer, theoretical analysis of the influence of the judicial system on Chicano identity, this chapter offers an analysis of the implications of both the American and the Mexican legal system in Morales’s The Brick People. Kaup, Monika. “From Hacienda to Brick Factory: The Architecture of the Machine and Chicano Collective Memory in Alejandro Morales’s The Brick People.” In U.S. Latino Literatures and Cultures: Transnational Perspectives, edited by Francisco A. Lomelí and Karin Ikas. Heidelberg, Germany: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 2000. Examines the novel’s treatment of industrialization and its relationship to the collective memory of Mexican Americans. Lee, James Kyung-Jin. “Fictionalizing Workers, or The Abuse of Fiction: Violence, Reading, and the Staging of Barrio-Space in Alejandro Morales’s The Brick People.” In Re-Placing America: Conversations and Contestations: Selected Essays, edited by Ruth Hsu, Cynthia Franklin, and Suzanne Kosanke. Honolulu: College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature, University of Hawaii, with East-West Center, 2000. Analyzes the treatment of the barrio, violence, and Mexican American workers in Morales’s novel. _______. Urban Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Examines The Brick People and three other novels written in the 1980’s to determine how they address the decade’s racial, economic, and ethnic inequities. Libretti, Tim. “Forgetting Identity, Recovering Politics: Rethinking Chicano/a Nationalism, Identity Politics, and Resistance to Racism in Alejandro Morales’s Death of an Anglo.” Post Identity 1, no. 1 (Fall, 1997): 66-93. This article analyzes Death of an Anglo for its description of nationalism and identity-based community in both Chicano and Anglo culture.

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Pablo Neruda Chilean poet Born: Parral, Chile; July 12, 1904 Died: Santiago, Chile; September 23, 1973 Also known as: Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto poetry: Crepusculario, 1923; Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, 1924 (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, 1969); Tentativa del hombre infinito, 1926; El hondero entusiasta, 1933; Residencia en la tierra, 1933, 1935, 1947 (3 volumes; Residence on Earth, and Other Poems, 1946, 1973); España en el corazón, 1937 (Spain in the Heart, 1946); Alturas de Macchu Picchu, 1948 (The Heights of Macchu Picchu, 1966); Canto general, 1950 (partial translation in Let the Rail Splitter Awake, and Other Poems, 1951; full translation as Canto General, 1991); Los versos del capitán, 1952 (The Captain’s Verses, 1972); Odas elementales, 1954 (The Elemental Odes, 1961); Las uvas y el viento, 1954; Nuevas odas elementales, 1956; Tercer libro de odas, 1957; Estravagario, 1958 (Extravagaria, 1972); Cien sonetos de amor, 1959 (One Hundred Love Sonnets, 1986); Navegaciones y regresos, 1959; Canción de gesta, 1960 (Song of Protest, 1976); Cantos ceremoniales, 1961; Las piedras de Chile, 1961 (The Stones of Chile, 1986); Plenos poderes, 1962 (Fully Empowered, 1975); Memorial de Isla Negra, 1964 (5 volumes; Isla Negra: A Notebook, 1981); Arte de pájaros, 1966 (Art of Birds, 1985); Una casa en la arena, 1966; La barcarola, 1967; Las manos del día, 1968; Aún, 1969 (Still Another Day, 1984); Fin de mundo, 1969; La espada encendida, 1970; Las piedras del cielo, 1970 (Stones of the Sky, 1987); Selected Poems, 1970; Geografía infructuosa, 1972; New Poems, 1968-1970, 1972; Incitación al Nixonicidio y alabanza de la revolución chilena, 1973 (Incitement to Nixonicide and Praise of the Chilean Revolution, 1979; also known as A Call for the Destruction of Nixon and Praise for the Chilean Revolution, 1980); El mar y las campanas, 1973 (The Sea and the Bells, 1988); La rosa 472

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separada, 1973 (The Separate Rose, 1985); El corazón amarillo, 1974 (The Yellow Heart, 1990); Defectos escogidos, 1974; Elegía, 1974; Pablo Neruda: Five Decades, a Selection (Poems, 1925-1970), 1974; 2000, 1974 (English translation, 1992); Jardín de invierno, 1974 (Winter Garden, 1986); Libro de las preguntas, 1974 (The Book of Questions, 1991); El mal y el malo, 1974; El río invisible: Poesía y prosa de juventud, 1980; The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, 2003 (Ilan Stavans, editor). long fiction: El habitante y su esperanza, 1926. drama: Romeo y Juliet, pb. 1964 (translation of William Shakespeare); Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta, pb. 1967 (Splendor and Death of Joaquin Murieta, 1972). nonfiction: Anillos, 1926 (with Tomás Lago); Viajes, 1955; Comiendo en Hungría, 1968; Confieso que he vivido: Memorias, 1974 (Memoirs, 1977); Cartas de amor, 1974 (letters); Lo mejor de Anatole France, 1976; Para nacer he nacido, 1978 (Passions and Impressions, 1983); Cartas a Laura, 1978 (letters); Correspondencia durante “Residencia en la tierra,” 1980 (letters; with Héctor Eandi).

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ablo Neruda (PAH-bloh nay-REW-duh) is one of the greatest South American poets of the twentieth century. He was born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto in Parral, a small frontier town in Chile, to José del Carmen Reyes, a railway worker, and Rosa Basoalto, who died of tuberculosis shortly after Neruda’s birth. The family eventually moved to Temuco, where Neruda attended school and met, at the age of twelve, the poet Gabriela Mistral, who introduced him to the great classical writers. “In this frontier—or ‘far west’—of my country,” Neruda later wrote, “I was born to life, land, poetry, and rain.” At the age of seventeen, honoring his father’s wish that he be educated for a profession, Neruda left Temuco to study French at the University of Chile in Santiago. In October, 1921, he won first prize in the Federacíon de Estudiantes poetry contest and subsequently began publishing poetry in Claridad, the organization’s magazine. One year later, initiating a long career that united poetry and politics, Neruda abandoned his studies, declared himself a poet and political activist, and took the pen name Pablo Neruda, af473

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ter the Czech writer Jan Neruda. In 1923 Neruda published his first book, Crepusculario, at his own expense, and the following year he published Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, his most widely read book. As a result of meeting the Chilean minister of external affairs, Neruda entered into a long career in his country’s diplomatic service. After his first consular post in Rangoon, Burma, other Chilean diplomatic positions took him to Ceylon, Jakarta, Java, and Singapore. During his travels in the Far East, Neruda wrote most of the poems in the first volume of Residence on Earth, and Other Poems, a book that shows its lonely author attempting to assimilate eternal images of time and place. In 1933 he was named Chilean consul to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he befriended the visiting Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. In 1934 Neruda was transferred to Barcelona, Spain, and later to Madrid. Still a diplomat in Spain when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, Neruda witnessed widespread violence, the imprisonment of friends, and the execution of Lorca. “The world changed,” Neruda wrote, “and my poetry has changed. One drop of blood falling on these lines will remain alive in them, indelible like love.” Published during the Spanish Civil War, Spain in the Heart showed that Neruda had turned from purely personal themes toward political causes. His Communist sympathies led him to organize support for Spanish Republicans, and he helped find asylum in Chile for refugees of the war. After

Poetry is rebellion. The poet was not offended when he was called subversive. Life transcends all structures, and there are new rules of conduct for the soul. The seed sprouts anywhere; all ideas are exotic; we wait for enormous changes every day; we live through the mutation of human order avidly: spring is rebellious. —from Memoirs (trans. W. S. Merwin)

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serving in another diplomatic post in Mexico, Neruda returned to Chile, where he wrote one of his best-known epic poems, The Heights of Macchu Picchu. His political activity ended when the Chilean government moved to the right, forcing Neruda and other Communists into hiding. He fled the country in February, 1948, and did not return until 1952, when the Chilean govern-

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Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair One year after the publication of Crepusculario (1923), Neruda’s collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924) appeared. It would become the most widely read collection of poems in the Spanish-speaking world. In it, Neruda charts the course of a love affair that progresses from passionate attraction to despair and indifference. In these poems, Neruda sees the whole world in terms of the beloved: The vastness of pine groves, the sound of beating wings, the slow interplay of lights, a solitary bell, the evening falling into your eyes, my darling, and in you the earth sings. Love shadows and timbres your voice in the dying echoing afternoon just as in those deep hours I have seen the field’s wheat bend in the mouth of the wind.

Throughout these twenty poems, Neruda’s intensity and directness of statement function to universalize his private experiences, in the process establishing another constant throughout his work: the effort to create a community of feeling through the expression of the common experiences that define the human condition. — Kenneth A. Stackhouse

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ment withdrew its order to arrest all leftist writers and political figures. Always a prolific writer, Neruda completed sixteen books of poetry in the final thirteen years of his life, including The Separate Rose and Winter Garden, two of several posthumously published volumes. In 1971 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. A poet of many themes and styles, Neruda has been referred to as the “Picasso of poetry.” Although each of his volumes projects a distinct voice and persona, his work is often divided into three periods: the early period up to the time of the Spanish Civil War, characterized by the first volume of Residence on Earth, and Other Poems; the middle period, from the time of Spain in the Heart through Canto General, which was written during his exile and before his return to Chile in 1952; and the final, longest, and most prolific period, from 1952 until his death in 1973. If there are consistent themes running through Neruda’s opus, they are those of love and death. In his earliest work Neruda identifies woman with nature; he uses nature imagery to describe woman, yet he also sees in woman a hopeful return to nature and the eternal life cycles. Later, in the middle period of his epic political poems, Neruda shows that life, corrupted by a world in disintegration, is only redeemed through love. In his epic vision, culminating in The Heights of Macchu Picchu, Neruda first sees human beings as weak and transitory against the eternal verities of nature; however, as his vision unfolds, Neruda defines impermanence not as death but as the individual’s isolation among the living. Thus he calls for love to transcend both the great deaths of civilizations, symbolized by the Inca ruins of Macchu Picchu, and the petty deaths each individual dies daily. In the last two decades of his life, although writing on a wide spectrum of themes in equally various styles, Neruda mainly returned to a personal expression of love. Throughout this final period Neruda expressed the wonder, play, nostalgia, and joy of passionate, romantic intimacy, what he calls “the entanglements of the genitals.” The style of Neruda’s early work, especially that of the three Residence on Earth, and Other Poems volumes, is often compared with Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Yet Neruda is a Surrealist 477

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of the natural world. Fascinated with simple objects, animals, and plants, Neruda turns these into ambiguous symbols that, as translators have noted, are difficult to render in English, given that they are parts of larger patterns of association. — Bill Hoagland Learn More Agosín, Marjorie. Pablo Neruda. Translated by Lorraine Roses. Boston: Twayne, 1986. A basic critical biography. Durán, Manuel, and Margery Safir. Earth Tones: The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. An excellent critical overview of Neruda’s life and work. Feinstein, Adam. Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. Comprehensive, detailed and accurate biography. Recounts Neruda’s experiences as a diplomat, his political activism in Chile, his years in exile, his marriages and love life, among other subjects. Well illustrated with photographs. Longo, Teresa, ed. Pablo Neruda and the U.S. Culture Industry. New York: Routledge, 2002. A collection of essays examining the process by which Neruda’s poetry was translated into English and the impact of its dissemination on American and Latino culture. Méndez-Ramírez, Hugo. Neruda’s Ekphrastic Experience: Mural Art and “Canto general.” Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1999. The book focuses on the interplay between verbal and visual elements in Neruda’s masterpiece Canto general. It demonstrates how mural art, especially that practiced in Mexico, became the source for Neruda’s ekphrastic desire, in which his verbal art paints visual elements. Nolan, James. Poet-Chief: The Native American Poetics of Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. A comparative study of Whitman and Neruda, and how they were influenced by the theme of Native American culture and the practice of oral poetry. Sayers Pedén, Margaret. Introduction to Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda, by Pablo Neruda. Translated by Sayers Pedén. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Sayers Pedén is 478

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among the most highly regarded translators of Latin American poetry. Her introduction to the translations in this bilingual edition constitutes an excellent critical study as well as providing biographical and bibliographical information. Teitelboim, Volodia. Neruda: A Personal Biography. Translated by Beverly J. DeLong-Tonelli. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. A biography written by a close friend and fellow political exile. Urrutia, Matilde. My Life with Pablo Neruda. Translated by Alexandria Giardino. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford General Books, 2004. Urrutia, Neruda’s muse and widow, recalls her life with the poet.

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Juan Carlos Onetti Uruguayan novelist and short-story writer Born: Montevideo, Uruguay; July 1, 1909 Died: Madrid, Spain; May 30, 1994 long fiction: El pozo, 1939, 1965 (The Pit, 1991); Tierra de nadie, 1941 (No Man’s Land, 1994; also known as Tonight, 1991); Para esta noche, 1943; La vida breve, 1950 (A Brief Life, 1976); Los adioses, 1954 (novella; Goodbyes, 1990); Una tumba sin nombre, 1959 (novella; better known as Para una tumba sin nombre; A Grave with No Name, 1992); La cara de la desgracia, 1960 (novella; The Image of Misfortune, 1990); El astillero, 1961 (The Shipyard, 1968); Tan triste como ella, 1963 (novella); Juntacadáveres, 1964 (Body Snatcher, 1991); La muerte y la niña, 1973; Dejemos hablar al viento, 1979 (Let the Wind Speak, 1997); Cuando ya no importe, 1993 (Past Caring?, 1995). short fiction: Un sueño realizado, y otros cuentos, 1951; El infierno tan temido, 1962; Jacob y el otro: Un sueño realizado, y otros cuentos, 1965; Cuentos completos, 1967, revised 1974; La novia robada, y otros cuentos, 1968; Cuentos, 1971; Tiempo de abrazar, 1974 (short stories and fragments of unpublished novels); Tan triste como ella, y otros cuentos, 1976; Goodbyes, and Other Stories, 1990. nonfiction: Réquiem por Faulkner, y otros escritos, 1975; Confesiones de un lector, 1995. miscellaneous: Obras completas, 1970; Onetti, 1974 (articles, interview).

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uan Carlos Onetti (hwahn KAHR-lohs oh-NEHT-tee) was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1909, the second of three children. He grew up in a stable, middle-class family, and he remembered his childhood as a happy one. His father, Carlos Onetti, was a customs official, and his mother, Borges de Onetti,

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was a descendant of wealthy Brazilian landowners. In 1930, he married his cousin, María Amalia Onetti, and left for Buenos Aires, Argentina. His first job in Buenos Aires was that of a salesman for a firm selling calculators. In 1933, he published his first short story, “Avenida de Mayo-Diagonal-Avenida de Mayo” (“May Avenue-Diagonal-May Avenue”) in La Prensa of Buenos Aires. While he was making some headway in his literary career, however, his personal life was not going well. After the breakup of his first marriage, he returned to Montevideo. He remarried; his second wife was María Julia Onetti, the sister of his first wife. In 1939 he helped to found and became chief editor of Marcha, which went on to become one of the most prestigious cultural weeklies in Latin America. Under the enlightened direction of luminaries such as Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Ángel Rama, and Jorge Ruffinelli, its cultural section established Uruguay as a cultural center in the Third World. In December, 1939, Onetti published The Pit. This novella constituted a break with the previous conventions of the genre. It is narrated by a middleaged man who is disillusioned with life. He lives in squalor and loneliness, separated from his wife, and his isolation is made all the worse by his sense that his country, Uruguay, lacks a cultural tradition able to sustain the individual spiritually. The novel offers a jaundiced view of the fragmentation of life in a modern urban environment; it may well be seen as a projection of Onetti’s own experience of city life.

Equally far—now that they call him Robert and he gets drunk on anything, shielding his mouth with a dirty hand when he coughs—from the Bob who drank beer, never more than two glasses during the longest of evenings, a pile of ten-piece coins on his table in the club’s bar to spend in the juke box. —from “Welcome, Bob”

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Vincenzo Flore

In 1941, Onetti moved back to Buenos Aires (where he was to remain until 1954) and began working for the British news agency Reuters. He subsequently went on to become editor of various periodicals. In 1941, his novel No Man’s Land was published by the prestigious publishing house Losada of Buenos Aires. Like his previous work, this novel focuses on the disjointed, and ultimately aimless, lives of people struggling to find some dignity for themselves in a hostile urban environment. 482

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Onetti’s second marriage also ended, and in 1945, he was married for the third time, to Elizabeth María Pekelhering. In 1950, he published his masterpiece, A Brief Life, which won him international fame. Like most of his fiction, it expresses in poignant fashion the spiritual anguish of life in the modern city. The following year, his wife gave birth to a daughter, Isabel María. In 1954, Onetti’s novella Goodbyes appeared; the following year, he returned to Montevideo to live. There, he worked for a publicity firm and later for the periodical Acción. In 1957, largely as a result of his literary success, he was elected director of the municipal library system in Montevideo. In the same year, he became a member of the board of directors of the Comedia Nacional. In 1961, he published The Shipyard, which offers a grim view of life in midcentury Uruguay. The narrator is Larsen, who had appeared in No Man’s Land; Larsen describes his desperate attempts to breathe new commercial life into a shipyard. Yet there are no ships, no work, and no orders. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the shipyard symbolizes the futility of humanity’s attempt to make sense of life. In 1963, Onetti was awarded the Premio National de Literature, Uruguay’s national literary prize. In the same year, The Shipyard was distinguished by receiving the William Faulkner Foundation Certificate of Merit. His novel Body Snatcher was published in 1964 and three years later was runner-up in competition for the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize, which is given every five years to the best novel written in Spanish. Like The Shipyard, it is set in the imaginary city of Santa María and features the same character, Larsen. It focuses on the plan entertained by a number of the residents to establish a brothel in Santa María; the project eventually ends in failure as a result of the opposition of a number of women. More important than the plot itself is the opportunity it provides for the narrative voice to provide a violently satiric vision of the sordidness of people’s lives. In 1968 a translation of The Shipyard was published in New York and brought Onetti’s work a great deal of international recognition. In 1970 an edition of his complete works was published, although his career as a novelist was by no means over. 483

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In 1974 Onetti was involved in a literary scandal, made all the more painful since he was by then a public figure on the Uruguayan literary scene. Uruguay had been witness to an alarming growth of political radicalization in the late 1960’s and 1970’s; the terrorist organization Tupamaros, named after the sixteenth century Indian leader Túpac Amaru, had been involved

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“Welcome, Bob” In this early Onetti story, popular with anthologists, a middle-aged narrator gets sadistic pleasure from observing the aging of Bob; it is his revenge for Bob’s preventing his marriage several years earlier to his sister Inez, because he was too old for her. At that time Bob told the narrator that he was a finished man, washed up, “like all men your age when they’re not extraordinary.” Bob tells the narrator that the most repulsive thing about old age, the very symbol of decomposition, is to think in terms of concepts formed by second-rate experiences. For the old, Bob says, there are no longer experiences at all, only habits and repetitions, “wilted names to go on tagging things with and half make them up.” After the sister rejects the narrator and Bob grows older, the narrator begins a friendship with him so that he can more closely watch Bob’s aging process. He delights in thinking of the young Bob who thought he owned the future and the world as he watches the man now called Robert, with tobacco-stained fingers, working in a stinking office, married to a fleshy woman. “No one has ever loved a woman as passionately as I love his ruin,” says the narrator, delighting in the hopeless manner in which Bob has sunk into his filthy life. The story ends with the narrator’s final sad and ironic triumph: “I don’t know if I ever welcomed Inez in the past with such joy and love as I daily welcome Bob into the shadowy and stinking world of adults.” — Charles E. May 484

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in a bitter and ruthless war with the state. In 1973 the military toppled the civilian government, which had by then been discredited, and seized power. Marcha, which had been founded by Onetti many years before and had been a forceful independent cultural voice of Uruguay for more than thirty years, was closed down by the military establishment in 1974. Journal archives were burned, historical research was prohibited, and many of the country’s works of literature, as well as works by contemporary European and U.S. writers, were banned from library bookshelves. These were shocking events, especially in a country that had prided itself on being the “Switzerland of Latin America.” Onetti, understandably, became embroiled in these events. In 1974 when the military repressiveness was at its height, a literary prize was awarded to a work that was critical of the military regime, and Onetti was unlucky enough to be one of the judges who voted for the award to be made. He was imprisoned as a result; however, because of his poor health and the public and international outcry that followed the decision to imprison him, he was released. In 1975 The Shipyard was awarded Italy’s prize for best foreign work translated into Italian that year. Onetti, who had been under increasing pressure from the military authorities, was refused leave to attend the awards ceremony. At this point Onetti felt that he had no choice but to leave his native country. He resigned his library post and traveled to Europe. He subsequently took up residence in Madrid with his wife, and he remained in self-imposed exile until his death; he eventually became a Spanish citizen. Onetti was awarded the Cervantes Prize, Spain’s most prestigious literary honor, in 1980. He died in Madrid in the spring of 1994. — Stephen M. Hart Learn More Adams, M. Ian. Three Authors of Alienation: Bombal, Onetti, Carpentier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975. Includes an extended discussion of Onetti’s novella The Pit, showing how Onetti’s artistic manipulation of schizophrenia creates a sensation of participating in an alienated world. 485

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Clark, Draper. “Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994): An Existential Allegory of Contemporary Man.” In Twayne Companion to Contemporary World Literature: From the Editors of World Literature Today, edited by Pamela A. Genova. New York: Twayne/ Thomson Gale, 2003. Analyzes the treatment of the individual and solitude in Onetti’s novels. Kadir, Djelal. Juan Carlos Onetti. Boston: Twayne, 1977. Offers one of the best introductions in English to Onetti’s life and work, with separate chapters on the main phases of Onetti’s life. Maloof, Judy. Over Her Dead Body: The Construction of Male Subjectivity in Onetti. New York: P. Lang, 1995. Focuses on gender relations in Onetti’s work. Millington, Mark. An Analysis of the Short Stories of Juan Carlos Onetti: Fictions of Desire. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993. Looks at Onetti’s short stories from a largely psychological perspective. _______. Reading Onetti: Language, Narrative and the Subject. Liverpool, England: Francis Cairns, 1985. Discusses the development of Onetti’s work under the “hegemony of international modernism.” Drawing on stylistics, the structure of the narrative, and post-structuralism, Millington focuses on the status of Onetti’s fiction as narrative discourse. Discusses how Goodbyes makes the art of reading problematic. Murray, Jack. The Landscapes of Alienation: Ideological Subversion in Kafka, Céline, and Onetti. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. In his discussion of alienation in Onetti’s fiction, Murray provides some background about how Uruguay has affected Onetti’s ideological unconscious. San Román, Gustavo, ed. Onetti and Others: Comparative Essays on a Major Figure in Latin American Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. A collection of twelve essays written from a variety of perspectives. Several focus on gender relationships in Onetti’s work; comparative studies relating Onetti to other Latin American writers also are prominent.

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Judith Ortiz Cofer Puerto Rican poet, short-story writer, and memoirist Born: Hormigueros, Puerto Rico; February 24, 1952 Also known as: Judith Ortiz long fiction: The Line of the Sun, 1989; The Meaning of Consuelo, 2003. short fiction: Latin Women Pray, 1980; The Native Dancer, 1981; Among the Ancestors, 1981; An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio, 1995. drama: Latin Women Pray, pr. 1984. poetry: Peregrina, 1986; Reaching for the Mainland, 1987; Terms of Survival, 1987; Reaching for the Mainland, and Selected New Poems, 1995. nonfiction: Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood, 1990; Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer, 2000. edited texts: Letters from a Caribbean Island, 1989; Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival, 1999 (with Marilyn Kallet); Riding Low on the Streets of Gold: Latino Literature for Young Adults, 2003. children’s literature: Call Me Maria, 2004. miscellaneous: The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry, 1993; The Year of Our Revolution: New and Selected Stories and Poems, 1998.

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orn in Hormigueros, near Mayagüez in southwest Puerto Rico, Judith Ortiz Cofer (JEW-dihth ohr-TEEZ KOH-fuhr) spent part of every year in Paterson, New Jersey, as she was growing up. Her father, Jesús Ortiz Lugo, who served in the U.S. Navy, was assigned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard during many of his service years. Although Ortiz’s mother, Fanny Morot Ortiz, saw to it that the family spent part of every year in Puerto Rico, they lived for long periods in Paterson, which became the setting of a 487

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My father was a quiet, serious man; my mother, earthy and ebullient. Their marriage, like my childhood, was the combining of two worlds, the mixing of two elements—fire and ice. This was sometimes exciting and life-giving and sometimes painful and draining. —from “The Black Virgin”

great many of Ortiz’s stories. Some of these stories center on El Building, as their apartment house was called when the Jewish tenants left and large numbers of Puerto Ricans moved in. Ortiz Cofer calls El Building a vertical barrio. The young Judith Ortiz attended school in Puerto Rico, where she went to San José Catholic School in San Germán, and in New Jersey, where she attended public schools and later St. Joseph’s Catholic School in Paterson. When she was sixteen, her father suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to retire from the Navy. The family moved to Augusta, Georgia, where Judith completed high school and enrolled in Augusta College, from which she graduated in 1974. She received a master’s degree from Florida Atlantic University in 1977 and that year also studied at Oxford University. Her first book, a reflective collection of stories entitled Latin Women Pray, appeared in 1980. Ortiz Cofer turned this collection into a play, which was produced in Atlanta in 1984. In 1981, Ortiz Cofer received a fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, where she subsequently served on the administrative staff during the summers of 1983 and 1984. During that time she published The Native Dancer and Among the Ancestors, and these works, as well as the poetry collection Reaching for the Mainland, appear to be a direct outcome of the Bread Loaf experience. Ortiz married Charles John Cofer during her sophomore year in college, and she taught bilingually from the time of her graduation until she completed the master’s degree. 488

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She thereupon taught English in various Florida colleges until 1984, when she joined the faculty of the University of Georgia at Athens, where she was appointed to teach creative writing. Ortiz Cofer’s first volume of poetry, Reaching for the Mainland, which she later revised and expanded, focuses on the conflicts inherent in Puerto Ricans’ struggle to adapt to the mainland environment and to master the language, the history, and the customs of a new society. In Terms of Survival she explores some of the same problems but also hones in on the Puerto Rican dialect, emphasizing its ability to dictate the roles that males and females play in society simply through its linguistic conventions. The book is psychologically challenging and thoughtprovoking.

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Silent Dancing Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990) is Judith Ortiz Cofer’s collection of fourteen essays and accompanying poems looking back on her childhood and adolescence in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, and Paterson, New Jersey. Her father joined the Navy before she was born, and two years later he moved them to Paterson, where he was stationed. When he went to sea for months at a time, he sent his wife and children back to Puerto Rico until he returned to New Jersey. While her father urged the family to assimilate in America and even moved them outside the Puerto Rican neighborhoods in New Jersey, her mother remained loyal to the island, and her quiet sadness emerges throughout the book. The central theme in the book is the traditional Puerto Rican “script of our lives,” which confines “everyone [to] their places.” The narrator struggles with her family’s expectations for her to become a traditional Puerto Rican woman: domestic, married, and fertile. This script allows little room for individual identity, so the

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The Line of the Sun, Ortiz Cofer’s first full-fledged novel, which is set both in Salud, Puerto Rico, and in Paterson, is concerned with immigration and with the problems of adjusting to a new society. This theme also pervades Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood, a collection of autobiographical essays, many of which focus on the dynamics of the vertical barrio in which Ortiz Cofer spent major portions of her childhood years. The Latin Deli, a collection of short prose pieces and poems, captures well the outlook of transplanted Puerto Ricans, most of whom harbor the dream of working on the mainland to assure their financial security but then returning to “The Island” to live out the rest of their lives. The principals in this book cling to

maturing narrator focuses on those characters who rewrite the script and extemporize their own lives (“Some of the Characters”). The embodiment of Puerto Rican tradition is Mamá, the grandmother who ironically gives Ortiz Cofer the tools that enable her to redefine her own role. In “More Room,” for instance, Ortiz Cofer tells the story about Mamá expelling her husband from her bedroom to avoid giving birth to even more children, thus liberating herself to enjoy her children, her grandchildren, and her own life. Similarly, “Tales Told Under the Mango Tree” portrays Mamá’s queenly role as the matriarchal storyteller surrounded by the young women and girls of the family as she passes on cuentos (stories) about being a Puerto Rican woman, such as the legend of the wise and courageous María Sabida who is not controlled by love and is “never a victim.” Silent Dancing is ultimately a Künstlerroman, the story of an artist’s apprenticeship. Ortiz Cofer has revised the script for her life as a Puerto Rican woman by inheriting Mamá’s role as storyteller; she redefines what it means to be a Puerto Rican woman and tells her stories to a wider audience. — Nancy L. Chick

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their old ways; the women, for example, cook the green plantains they buy at inflated prices in the neighborhood bodegas, where they also purchase the overpriced Bustelo coffee without which their afternoon coffee klatches would lack authenticity. In this collection, especially in the story entitled “Not for Sale,” Ortiz Cofer focuses on the clash of cultures. Ortiz Cofer broaches the conflict between Puerto Ricans and African Americans in the story “The Paterson Public Library,” in which Lorraine, a black bully, intimidates the story’s Puerto Rican protagonist for purely racial reasons. — R. Baird Shuman Learn More Hernandez, Carmen Dolores. Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997. Ortiz Cofer is interviewed in this collection of interviews with Puerto Rican writers who live in the United States and write in English. The writers discuss their lives, the experience of living in both the American and Puerto Rican cultures, and their literary tradition. Kanellos, Nicolas, ed. The Hispanic American Almanac: A Reference Work on Hispanics in the United States. 3d ed. Detroit: Gale Group, 1993. Includes a brief but useful sketch of the writer and her work. Mujcinovic, Fatima. Postmodern Cross-culturalism and Politicization in U.S. Latina Literature: From Ana Castillo to Julia Alverez. Modern American Literature 42. New York: P. Lang, 2004. A literary and cultural analysis of the work of Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and Dominican American women writers, including Ortiz Cofer. Mujcinovic views these writers’ work from a contemporary feminist, political, postcolonial, and psychoanalytical perspective. Ortiz Cofer, Judith. “Judith Ortiz Cofer.” http://www.english .uga.edu/~~jcofer/. Accessed March 22, 2005. This Web site contains a curriculum vitae and links to articles, interviews, and Web sites about the author. _______.Women in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. In this collection of poems 492

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and essays, Ortiz Cofer expresses her love of language, explains how she became a writer, and discusses the challenges of living between two cultures and meeting the demands of family and career. Rivera, Carmen S. Kissing the Mango Tree: Puerto Rican Women Rewriting American Literature. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 2002. One of the chapters is an analysis of Ortiz Cofer’s work, locating it within the framework of feminist theory and literature. Includes a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Sanchez-Gonzalez, Lisa. Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Ortiz Cofer’s novel The Line of the Sun is analyzed in this comprehensive survey of literature written by Puerto Ricans who live in the United States.

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Nicanor Parra Chilean poet Born: Chillán, Chile; September 5, 1914 poetry: Cancionero sin nombre, 1937; Poemas y antipoemas, 1954 (Poems and Antipoems, 1967); La cueca larga, 1958; Versos de salón, 1962; Canciones rusas, 1967; Obra gruesa, 1969; Los profesores, 1971; Emergency Poems, 1972; Artefactos, 1972; Antipoems: New and Selected, 1985; Nicanor Parra: Biografia emotiva, 1988; Poemas para combatir la calvicie: Muestra de antipoesia, 1993. nonfiction: Pablo Neruda y Nicanor Parra: Discursos, 1962; Discursos de sobremesa, 1997; Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra Face to Face, 1997.

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icanor Parra (NEE-kah-nohr PAH-rah) is the originator of the contemporary poetic movement in Latin America known as “antipoetry.” The prefix notwithstanding, antipoetry, however unconventional, is poetry, and Parra himself willingly explains his concept of the form. It is, he says, traditional poetry enriched by Surrealism. As the word implies, the “antipoem” belongs to that tradition which rejects the established poetic order. In this case, it rebels against the sentimental idealism of Romanticism, the elegance and the superficiality of the Modernistas, and the irrationality of the vanguard movement. It is not a poetry of

A young man of scanty means doesn’t know what’s going on He lives in a bell jar called Art Or Lust or Science Trying to make contact with a world of relationships That only exist for him and a small group of friends. —from “The Tunnel” (trans. W. S. Merwin) 494

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Courtesy of New Directions

heroes, but of antiheroes, because man has nothing to sing to or celebrate. The antipoet, as this Chilean calls himself, is the absolute antiromantic, debasing all, even himself, while producing verses that are aggressive, wounding, sarcastic, and irritating. One of eight children in a family plagued by economic insecurity, Parra, grew up in Chillán, in the south of Chile. His father was a schoolteacher whose irresponsibility and alcoholism placed considerable strain on the life and order of the family, which was held together by Parra’s mother. Parra was in his early teens when his father died. The earlier antipathy he felt toward his father then turned toward his mother, and he left home. He began a process of identification with his father, toward whom he felt both attraction and repulsion, and to whom he attributes the basic elements of his inspiration for antipoetry. During his youth, Parra composed occasional verses, so that when he went to the University of Chile in Santiago in 1933 he 495

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felt that he was a poet in addition to being a student of physics. He associated with the literary leaders at the student residence where he lived, and a year prior to being graduated in 1938, he had published his first volume of poetry, Cancionero sin nombre. After completing studies in mathematics and physics at the Pedagogical Institute of the University, Parra taught for five years in secondary schools in Chile. Between 1943 and 1945, he

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La Cueca Larga and Versos de salón Parra’s third collection, La cueca larga (1958; the long cueca—the cueca is a native dance of Chile), exalts wine; written in the popular tradition of marginal literature, the book is an anti-intellectual contribution to Chilean folklore. It is similar to antipoetry—the style that Parra developed to reject sentiment in favor of creating an experience that stressed life’s hopelessness and man’s fallen condition—in its preference for the masses and its position on the periphery of established literature. In Versos de salón (1962; salon verses), Parra returned to the antipoetic technique, but with some significant differences. The ironic attack on the establishments of society remains, but these poems are shorter than the earlier ones. They are fragments whose images follow one another in rapid fashion and mirror the absurd chaos of the world. The reader, forced to experience this confusion at first hand, is left restless, searching for a meaning that is not to be found. The chaotic enumeration of the Surrealists, a favorite technique with Parra, abounds, while the anecdotal poetry of Poems and Antipoems (1954), with its emphasis on dialogue, all but disappears. The sense of alienation is sharper, the bitterness and disillusion more deeply felt, the humor more pointed. The antihero changes from a victim into an odd creature who flings himself at the world in open confrontation. His introverted suffering is now a metaphysical despair. — Alfred W. Jensen 496

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studied advanced mechanics at Brown University in the United States. Returning home in 1948, he was named Director of the School of Engineering at the University of Chile. He spent two years in England studying cosmology at Oxford, and upon his return to South America he was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Chile. The publication of Parra’s second collection of poetry, Poems and Antipoems, formally introduced the antipoetry with which his name is associated. This new poetry shook the foundation of the theory of the genre in Latin America, winning for its author both condemnation and praise. In 1963, Parra visited the Soviet Union, where he supervised the translation into Spanish of an anthology of Soviet poets, and then traveled to the People’s Republic of China. He visited Cuba in 1965 and the following year served as a visiting professor at Louisiana State University, later holding similar positions at New York University, Columbia, and Yale. Parra has plowed new terrain in Latin American poetry using a store of methods which traditional poetry rejects or ignores. Nevertheless, his work has been attacked as boring, disturbing, crude, despairing, ignoble, inconclusive, petulant, and devoid of lyricism. The antipoet generally agrees with these points of criticism but begs the reader to lay aside what amounts to a nostalgic defense of worn-out traditions and join him in a new experience. Parra has established himself firmly in a prominent position in Latin American literature, influencing both his defenders and detractors. — Alfred W. Jensen Learn More Carrasco, Iván. Para leer a Nicanor Parra. Santiago, Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1999. An insightful analysis of the perception of Parra’s work as antipoetry. An expert on Parra’s work analyzes the evolution of his poetry from its rejection of thematic and syntactic structures to the development of a unique yet mutable voice that responds to its social and political environment. In Spanish. Grossman, Edith. The Antipoetry of Nicanor Parra. New York: New York University Press, 1975. One of the few books about 497

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Parra that is written in English. Grossman analyzes Parra’s poetic style and technique. Neruda, Pablo. Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra Face to Face. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. This is a bilingual and critical edition of speeches by both Neruda and Parra on the occasion of Neruda’s appointment to the University of Chile’s faculty, with English translations and a useful introduction by Marlene Gottlieb. Bibliographical references. Parra, Nicanor. Antipoems: How to Look Better and Feel Good. Antitranslation by Liz Werner. New York: New Directions Books, 2004. Collection of fifty-eight poems, thirty-three of which have never before been published. The poems illustrate Parra’s mocking humor and his ability to subvert conventions and pretentions in poetry and life. Werner, the “antitranslator” (Parra’s word) of these poems, analyzes Parra’s work in an introductory essay. _______. Antipoems: New and Selected. Translated by Frank MacShane, and edited by David Unger. New York: New Directions, 1985. This bilingual anthology focuses on representative antipoems in an attempt to demonstrate how Parra’s poetry has revolutionized poetic expression globally as well as within the sphere of Latin American poetry. Notes by the editor enhance understanding for English-speaking readers. Parrilla Sotomayor, Eduardo E. Humorismo y sátira en la poesía de Nicanor Parra. Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 1997. This study identifies and discusses the elements of humor and satire in Parra’s antipoetry. It analyzes the poet’s technique as well as unique antirhetorical style and language that creates a direct link to contemporary Latin American society. In Spanish. Sarabia, Rosa. Poetas de la palabra hablada: Un estudio de la poesía hispanoaméricana contemporánea. London: Tamesis, 1997. This study analyzes the oral nature of the literary production of several representative contemporary Latin American writers with roots in oral literature. In her chapter titled “Nicanor Parra: La antipoesía y sus políticas,” the author explores the origins and consequences of antipoetry in its political and social milieus in contemporary Latin America. In Spanish. 498

Octavio Paz Mexican poet and essayist Born: Mexico City, Mexico; March 31, 1914 Died: Mexico City, Mexico; April 19, 1998 poetry: Luna silvestre, 1933; Bajo tu clara sombra, y otros poemas sobre España, 1937; Raíz del hombre, 1937; Entre la piedra y la flor, 1941; Libertad bajo palabra, 1949, 1960; Águila o sol?, 1951 (Eagle or Sun?, 1970); Semillas para un himno, 1954; Piedra de sol, 1957 (Sun Stone, 1963); La estación violenta, 1958; Agua y viento, 1959; Libertad bajo palabra: Obra poética, 1935-1957, 1960, revised 1968; Salamandra, 1962; Selected Poems, 1963; Blanco, 1967 (English translation, 1971); Discos visuales, 1968; Topoemas, 1968; La centena, 1969; Ladera este, 1969; Configurations, 1971; Renga, 1972 (in collaboration with three other poets; Renga: A Chain of Poems, 1972); Early Poems, 1935-1955, 1973; Pasado en claro, 1975 (A Draft of Shadows, and Other Poems, 1979); Vuelta, 1976; Poemas, 1979; Selected Poems, 1979; Airborn = Hijos del Aire, 1981 (with Charles Tomlinson); The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957-1987, 1987; Arbol adentro, 1987 (A Tree Within, 1988); Obra poetica (1935-1988), 1990; Stanzas for an Imaginary Garden, 1990 (limited edition); Viento, agua, piedra/Wind, Water, Stone, 1990 (limited edition); A Tale of Two Gardens: Poems from India, 1952-1995, 1997; “Snapshots,” 1997; Figuras y figuraciones, 1999 (Figures and Figurations, 2002). drama: La hija de Rappaccini, pb. 1990 (dramatization of a Nathaniel Hawthorne story; Rappacini’s Daughter, 1996). nonfiction: Voces de España, 1938; Laurel, 1941; El laberinto de la soledad: Vida y pensamiento de México, 1950, revised and enlarged 1959 (The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico, 1961); El arco y la lira, 1956 (The Bow and the Lyre, 1971); Las peras del olmo, 1957; Rufino Tamayo, 1959 (Rufino Tamayo: Myth and Magic, 1979); Magia de la risa, 1962; Cuatro poetas 499

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contemporáneos de Suecia, 1963; Cuadrivio, 1965; Poesia en movimiento, 1966; Puertas al campo, 1966; Remedios Varo, 1966; Claude Lévi-Strauss: O, El nuevo festín de Esopo, 1967 (Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction, 1970); Corriento alterna, 1967 (Alternating Current, 1973); Marcel Duchamp, 1968 (Marcel Duchamp: Or, The Castle of Purity, 1970); Conjunciones y disyunciones, 1969 (Conjunctions and Disjunctions, 1974); México: La última década, 1969; Posdata, 1970 (The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid, 1972); Las cosas en su sitio, 1971; Los signos en rotación y otros ensayos, 1971; Traducción: Literatura y literalidad, 1971; Apariencia desnuda: La obra de Marcel Duchamp, 1973 (Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, 1978); El signo y el garabato, 1973; Solo a dos voces, 1973; La búsqueda del comienzo, 1974; Los hijos del limo: Del romanticismo a la vanguardia, 1974 (Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde, 1974); El mono gramático, 1974 (The Monkey Grammarian, 1981); Teatro de signos/transparencias, 1974; Versiones y diversiones, 1974; The Siren and the Seashell, and Other Essays on Poets and Poetry, 1976; Xavier Villaurrutia en persona y en obra, 1978; In/ mediaciones, 1979; México en la obra de Octavio Paz, 1979, expanded 1987; El ogro filantrópico: Historia y politica 1971-1978, 1979 (The Philanthropic Ogre, 1985); Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: O, Las trampas de la fé, 1982 (Sor Juana: Or, The Traps of Faith, 1989); Sombras de obras: Arte y literatura, 1983; Tiempo nublado, 1983 (One Earth, Four or Five Worlds: Reflections on Contemporary History, 1985); Hombres en su siglo y otros ensayos, 1984; On Poets and Others, 1986; Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature, 1987; Primeras letras, 1931-1943, 1988 (Enrico Mario Santi, editor); Poesía, mito, revolución, 1989; La búscueda del presente/ In Search of the Present: Nobel Lecture, 1990, 1990; La otra voz: Poesía y fin de siglo, 1990 (The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry, 1991); Pequeña crónica de grandes días, 1990; Convergencias, 1991; Al paso, 1992; One Word to the Other, 1992; Essays on Mexican Art, 1993; Itinerario, 1993 (Itinerary: An Intellectual Journey, 1999); La llama doble: Amor y erotismo, 1993 (The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, 1995); Un más allá erótico: Sade, 1993 (An Erotic Beyond: Sade, 1998); Vislumbres de la India, 1995 (In Light of India, 1997). 500

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edited texts: Antología poética, 1956 (Anthology of Mexican Poetry, 1958; Samuel Beckett, trans.); New Poetry of Mexico, 1970. miscellaneous: Lo mejor de Octavio Paz: El fuego de cada dia, 1989; Obras completas de Octavio Paz, 1994; Blanco, 1995 (facsimiles of manuscript fragments and letters).

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o Mexican writer did more to explore and celebrate the mysteries of Mexican life than poet and essayist Octavio Paz (ahk-TAH-vyoh pahz), considered to be the leading twentieth century interpreter of his country’s complex civilization. Paz’s poems explore life’s illusions and fragmented realities, the problem of language, the innocent individual, humankind’s loss of connection with nature and its rhythms, and the disordered, dislocated modern world. Known primarily as a poet, Paz also distinguished himself as a diplomat and essayist, delving into such areas as religion, philosophy, and politics in the course of his work. Born into a family of intellectuals in Mexico City, Paz inherited a literary tradition through his grandfather, Irineo Paz, a newspaper publisher and novelist. His father practiced law and briefly published one of the first Spanish-language newspapers in Los Angeles, California, where the family lived for a year in the early 1920’s as political exiles. Upon returning to Mexico, his father fell victim to a political assassination and Paz, an only child, was left alone with his widowed mother.

My steps along this street resound in another street in which I hear my steps passing along this street in which Only the mist is real —“Here” (trans. Charles Tomlinson) 501


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By the 1930’s Paz had become a leading voice of a new generation of Mexican intellectuals. After completing the course of study in law at the National University, he abruptly abandoned law and Mexico, failing to turn in his final thesis and traveling to Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). There, he became part of the tragic intellectual venture that culminated in the fall of the Spanish Republic. As a witness to the deaths of fellow writers, exponents of the noblest expressions of language and culture, and the destruction of human values and ideals, Paz found his poetic voice and published his first two books. They received immediate recognition. Upon his return to Mexico, he collaborated in founding two important literary journals, Taller and El hijo pródigo. During the 1940’s Paz traveled to the United States on a Guggenheim Fellowship and studied at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1944 to 1945, then lived briefly in New York. The distance created by the English language and AngloAmerican culture sowed the seeds for the introspective interpretation that marked the essays published in The Labyrinth of Solitude, in which Paz contrasts Mexico’s long history to that of the United States, affording a hermeneutical view of the differences between these two neighboring countries. It was in France, however, that Paz’s love for his native land, combined with his fascination for Surrealist poetry’s notions of spontaneity, movement, dislocation, and freedom, enabled him to develop his art to a new degree of strength. The culmination of his 1946 to 1951 stay in France with the Mexican diplomatic service was the much-praised poetry collection Sun Stone, which he wrote in a Surrealist vein after leaving France and published in 1957. Lessons learned from French colleagues stayed with Paz for the remainder of his life. His diplomatic career from the 1940’s to the 1960’s serving at the Mexican embassies in France, Japan, and India afforded him the opportunity to expand his views—to look at the problems of existence and the capacity for creativity in worlds still connected to the sacred and the mythic while coming to terms with progress in an increasingly dehumanized world. In Japan, he adapted some of the formalized techniques of Japanese po503

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Eagle or Sun? Eagle or Sun? (1951), a collection of short prose poems, was the first book of its kind in Spanish and has been extremely influential. Each of its three parts, which are tenuously connected only through their formal similarities, functions autonomously. Part 1, “Trabajos del poeta” (“The Poet’s Works”), consists of sixteen brief sections, each of which elaborates a narrative line, but usually in strongly imagistic and even surrealistic language. The surface concerns of these poems mask Paz’s underlying interest: the poet’s relationship with his creation. This is not allegory; here, the reader perceives the two levels simultaneously. The ubiquitous silence is interrupted by a tapping: “it is the sound of horses’ hooves galloping on a field of stone. . . .” These are the words appearing, demanding articulation. They pour out uncontrollably, this “vomit of words”: The thistle whistles, bristles, buckles with chuckles. Broth of moths, charts of farts, all together, ball of syllables of waste matter, ball of snot splatter, ball of the viscera of

ets to his own writing. A new concern with structure, along with his Surrealist impulses, enriched Paz’s poems. Paz was Mexico’s ambassador to India during the 1960’s, a decade that left an indelible mark on the man and his work. In literary terms, these changes are evident in Ladera este and Blanco, works that explore the language and space of literature. Here the work is symbol and sign; the text is an aesthetic (concrete) manifestation which simultaneously confers verbal meaning. In these works, Paz fully explored the “other,” not only as a manifestation of the self but also as an integral voice within his poetic construct. The “other” is what lies beyond the parameters of the ordinary; it is myth and dream, love and eroticism. Dur504

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syllable sibyls, chatter, deaf chatter. I flap, I swing, smashdunguided I flap.

Here, Paz conveys what it is like to be an artist, always at the mercy of competing inner voices, of spontaneous creative demands. The second part of Eagle or Sun?, “Arenas movedizas” (“Shifting Sands”), consists of nine sections; each is a selfcontained account couched in mundane, imageless prose with occasional dialogue interspersed. Some of the sections, such as “El ramo azul” (“The Blue Bouquet”), recall the manner of Jorge Luis Borges; others, such as “Un aprendizaje difícil” (“A Difficult Apprenticeship”), are Kafkaesque; still others, such as “Mi vida con la ola” (“My Life with the Wave”), have the flavor of André Breton: Together, they resemble a collection of very short stories more than they do a series of prose poems. The concluding part of Eagle or Sun?, the title section, contains twenty-one pieces. Divided between investigations into the poetics of creation and metaphysical narratives—Paz thus attempts to combine the methodologies developed in parts one and two—these pieces are abstract and are therefore less accessible than the earlier ones in the volume, but they are not meant to be hermetic conundrums. — Robert Hauptman

ing his sojourn in India, Paz married Marie-José Tramini, who became his lifelong soul mate and companion. Near the end of the decade, Paz was faced with choosing between conformity and principles. In October, 1968, the Mexican government ordered troops against the student demonstrations taking place during the Summer Olympics in Mexico City. The result was a massacre, and Octavio Paz resigned as ambassador to New Delhi in protest. Paz spent much of the 1970’s and 1980’s as a visiting professor at various academic institutions, including Cambridge University, where he was appointed to the Simón Bolívar Chair, and later at Harvard University as Samuel Eliot Norton Professor of 505

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Poetry. In Mexico he founded and directed the literary magazine Plural (later Vuelta). This was also a period of intense and prolific writing and of international recognition. By the 1990’s, Paz had been honored with every important international prize, culminating with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990. All these experiences, combined with a continued and acute awareness of the meaning of the Mexican historical and cultural legacy, informed Paz’s writing. Juxtaposing dualities—such as the mythic timelessness of ancient Mexico and modern questions of temporality and human existence—and examining the larger questions that define human existence, his is a voice that constantly challenges the reader to probe and examine the tenets of the human condition. — John D. Raymer and Margarita Nieto Learn More Bloom, Harold, ed. Octavio Paz. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002. Bloom’s introduction focuses on two prose works, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Sor Juana: Or, The Traps of Faith. The book’s eleven essays primarily focus on Paz’s poetry, describing his ideas, motifs, and style. The sophisticated nature and technical language of some of these essays may be difficult for some high school students. Grenier, Yvon. From Art to Politics: Octavio Paz and the Pursuit of Freedom. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. Focuses on the ways in which Paz’s social and political views surface in his poetry. Hozven, Roberto, ed. Otras voces: Sobre la poesía y prosa de Octavio Paz. Riverside: University of California Press, 1996. A collection of critical essays in both English and Spanish. Includes bibliographical references. Quiroga, José. Understanding Octavio Paz. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. A critical study of selected poems by Paz. Includes a bibliography of the author’s works, an index, and bibliographical references. Roman, Joseph. Octavio Paz. New York: Chelsea House, 1994. A brief introduction, presenting the poet’s life and career. Suitable for young adults. 506

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Stavans, Ilan. Octavio Paz: A Meditation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. Stavans, a noted critic of Latino culture, ponders Paz’s ability to maintain his intellectual courage in an age of ideology. Wilson, Jason. Octavio Paz. Boston: Twayne, 1986. A solid introduction in Twayne’s World Authors series. Contains a bibliography and an index. _______. Octavio Paz: A Study of His Poetics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Brief, useful biographical and analytical study of Paz and his poetry. Encomiums, texts, and articles concerning Paz on the occasion of his receiving the Neustadt Prize.

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Miguel Piñero Puerto Rican playwright and poet Born: Gurabo, Puerto Rico; December 19, 1946 Died: New York, New York; June 17, 1988 Also known as: Miguel Antonio Gomez Piñero drama: Short Eyes, pr. 1974; The Sun Always Shines for the Cool, pr. 1976; Eulogy for a Small-Time Thief, pr. 1977; A Midnight Moon at the Greasy Spoon, pr. 1981; Outrageous: One-Act Plays, pb. 1986. poetry: La Bodega Sold Dreams, 1980. screenplay: Short Eyes, 1977 (adaptation of his play). teleplay: “Smuggler’s Blues,” 1984 (episode of Miami Vice). edited text: Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings, 1975.

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iguel Piñero (mih-GEHL peen-YEHR-oh) is an important member of the Nuyorican (New York and Puerto Rican) literary and political movement that crystallized in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s in New York City. Born in Puerto Rico, Piñero moved to New York City with his parents when he was four. His father, Miguel Angel Piñero, abandoned the family four years later, and Piñero subsequently experienced the poverty, marginalization, and crime of New York’s lower East Side. Piñero remained devoted to his mother, Adelina, as his poems and opening dedication to Short Eyes (“El Cumpleaños de Adelina” by Miguel Algarín) reveal. At an early age, Piñero fell victim to his harsh environment: he began “hustling” and taking drugs and soon entered the world of petty crime that was to shape his future. A truant, shoplifter, and drug addict by his teenage years, Piñero never graduated from junior high. He was convicted of armed robbery at age twenty-four and was sent to Sing Sing, the notorious New York prison. Ironically, it was in prison that Piñero experienced his literary awakening, thanks to a theater workshop established

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at Sing Sing by Clay Stevenson. Like that of most Nuyorican authors, Piñero’s experience as a marginalized Puerto Rican in America was to become the source for a significant portion of his literary output. Through Stevenson’s prison workshop, Piñero began his first and most recognized play, Short Eyes. In addition, while still in prison he came into contact with Marvin Felix Camillo, actor and activist, who had formed The Family, an acting troupe of former inmates, and who encouraged Piñero’s writing and acting. Out of prison, Piñero worked with Camillo and The Family to develop Short Eyes for performance. The play moved from its opening in the Riverside Church to Off-Broadway, to the Public Theater with the help of producer Joseph Papp, and finally to the Vivian Beaumont Theater. Piñero received both an Obie Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best American play. Piñero’s success in playwriting put him in contact with the thriving Puerto Rican literary and political community. In the mid-1970’s, as a member of the Nuyorican artistic community, Piñero cofounded the Nuyorican Poets Café with Miguel Algarín and edited a volume of Nuyorican poetry with Algarín as well. After a return to Puerto Rico, Piñero’s work also reflected the displacement of the Puerto Rican experience in America: He and his fellow artists felt accepted neither in their native land nor in their land of adoption, and such alienation is a major tenet of Nuyorican literature. Like the dialogue of his characters, his poetry—and the poetry of the Nuyorican Poets

i was born on an island where to be puerto rican meant to be part of the land & soul & puertorriqueños were not the minority puerto ricans were first, none were second no, i was not born here . . . —from “This Is Not the Place Where I Was Born”

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Café—was characterized by oral performances of it, as poets performed their works in an apparently improvisational style, reflecting the influence of the Beat poets, of Puerto Rican street culture, and of the emerging African American rap and hip-hop styles. Piñero continued to write and see his plays performed, but none were to have the success of Short Eyes. In 1977 Piñero wrote the screenplay and performed in the film version of his play Short Eyes. From the early 1970’s into the 1980’s, he began a long series of guest-starring appearances in television and cinema. Most notably, he played a series of drug smugglers and ne’er-do-wells in such television series as Miami Vice (1984), The Equalizer (1985), and Kojak (1973). On film, he appeared in Breathless (1983), Exposed (1983), and Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981). In addition to working in Hollywood, Piñero also taught writing at Rutgers University and received a Guggenheim Fellowship for playwriting in 1982. Such activity and influence in his ethnic and literary community could not help in his battle against addiction, however, and Piñero continued to struggle with drugs and alcohol. Never married, Piñero had a series of serious relationships with both women and men, and an intense, although nonsexual, relationship with fellow Nuyorican poet Algarín. Piñero died in 1988 of cirrhosis of the liver. Piñero’s Short Eyes remains his most successful and enduring contribution to American playwriting and reveals his primary concerns with ethnic and racial alienation in the United States, the all-controlling power of violence, and the hope of individual triumph against such terror. In addition, it offers a window onto the language—a mixture of Spanish, English, street language, and profanity—that in many ways embodies the world of New York’s lower East Side, where Nuyorican literature developed and thrived. His later works, although virtually ignored by literary critics, reveal Piñero’s continued focus on the language, alienation, and perseverance of his community. Despite his close dealings with the New York and Hollywood elite, Piñero remained rooted in his lower East Side, Nuyorican experiences. In December, 2001, Piñero, a film of the author’s life directed by Leon Ichaso, opened in limited release and prompted re510

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Short Eyes Short Eyes (1974) was Miguel Piñero’s first and most famous play. After its debut, critics hailed the author as the first Puerto Rican playwright to enter theater’s mainstream. The play begins with a group of prisoners—mostly African American and Latino—struggling to maintain a sense of dignity under deplorable conditions. Early action focuses on Clark Davis, one of only two white members of the group, who is from a different socioeconomic background than most of the other inmates. Davis has been accused of child molestation, a crime that the other inmates consider especially shameful, and makes his situation worse by refusing to adapt to the prison’s customs. Through the play’s second act he is harassed constantly, and is ultimately murdered. The guilty prisoners are not punished—the guards look the other way—but must come to terms with their guilt and responsibility. Only one of the inmates, an elderly Puerto Rican man named Juan, refused to participate in the murder. Paradoxically, he is the only one who knows that Davis is guilty. Critics have argued whether Juan abstained from the murder because of its immorality or because it was in the interest of his self-preservation to do so; perhaps both are true. Juan does not allow himself to take another’s life, but neither does he make any attempt to relieve Davis’s murderers of their guilt (the other prisoners have been told by a guard that Davis had been mistakenly identified and was innocent). Piñero wrote Short Eyes after serving a jail sentence for armed robbery at Sing Sing prison. It draws heavily from his knowledge of life in jail, depicting the violence of prison life from the inmates’ perspectives. The play’s title comes from a slang term for pornography, “short heist.” Piñero explained many Puerto Ricans had difficulty pronouncing the h in “heist,” so the word sounded more like “eyes.” — Anna A. Moore 511

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newed interest in the author and actor, particularly in his poetic performances. The film had the support and cooperation of Piñero’s friends and family. Actor Benjamin Bratt’s performance as Piñero, particularly in his “performance” of Piñero’s poems at the Nuyorican Poets Café, suggests the intensity and immediacy of his poetry as performance that mere readings of Piñero’s work cannot impart. — Cami D. Agan Learn More Camillo, Marvin Felix. Introduction to Short Eyes, by Miguel Piñero. New York: Hill & Wang, 1975. Camillo’s introduction is helpful in explaining the process by which Piñero moved from inmate at Sing Sing to author and performer, then to award-winning Broadway playwright. The introduction also contains an analysis of the play. Deaver, William O. “Miguel Piñero (1946-1988).” In Latino and Latina Writers, edited by Alan West-Durán. Vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004. The biographical article on Piñero provides information on his life, a detailed summary of his drama and poetry, and a bibliography of primary and secondary literature. Fahy, Thomas Richard, and Kimball King, eds. Captive Audience: Prison and Captivity in Contemporary Theater. New York: Routledge, 2003. Analyzes works by Piñero and other dramatists to describe how incarceration is depicted in their plays. Maffi, Mario. “The Nuyorican Experience in the Plays of Pedro Pietri and Miguel Piñero.” In Cross-Cultural Studies: American, Canadian and European Literatures, 1945-1985, edited by Mirko Jurak. Bled, Slovenia: Symposium on Contemporary Literatures and Cultures of the United States of America and Canada, 1988. Although this essay is primarily a literary analysis of Pietri and Piñero’s works, Maffi examines the environment of New York City in the 1970’s, in which Puerto Rican authors developed and against which they constructed an identity. He explains the importance of language in Nuyorican works and the centrality of poetry and theater to the aesthetic. 512

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“Miguel Piñero.” In Twentieth Century American Dramatists, edited by Christopher J. Wheatley. Vol. 266 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Group, 2003. The biographical entry on Piñero includes information on his life, works, and the production and reception of his plays. Piñero, Miguel. “Miguel Piñero: ‘I Wanted to Survive.’” Interview by Nat Hentoff. The New York Times, May 5, 1974, pp. 1, 8. Hentoff’s interview with Piñero took place when Short Eyes was on stage at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater. It provides helpful insight into Piñero’s life in New York. Saldivar, Jose David. “Miguel Piñero.” In Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Literature in the United States: The Literature of Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Other Hispanic Writers, edited by Nicolas Kanellos. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. The dictionary’s entry on Piñero contains a brief biography, a discussion of the major themes of his work, a survey of criticism, and a bibliography.

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Mary Helen Ponce Mexican American novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist Born: Pacoima, California; January 24, 1938 Also known as: Maria Elena Ponce long fiction: The Wedding, 1989. short fiction: Recuerdo: Short Stories of the Barrio, 1983; Taking Control, 1987. nonfiction: Hoyt Street: An Autobiography, 1993 (reprinted in 1995 in English as Hoyt Street: Memories of a Chicana Childhood and in Spanish as Calle Hoyt: Memorias de una juventud chicana).

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prolific author of Chicano prose, Mary Helen Ponce (POHN-say) was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California. The youngest of ten children (seven girls and three boys), Ponce grew up in the security of her barrio (neighborhood) community, a blend of Mexicans and Mexican Americans for whom the family, the Catholic church, the school, and the little local grocery store provided stable landmarks for a world moving between languages and cultures. Writing in English and Spanish, or in English with brief shifts to Spanish, Ponce conjures the experiences of her childhood and youth in a bilingual and bicultural context, addressing the female experience in particular. Ponce attended California State University at Northridge, earning a B.A. and an M.A. in Mexican American studies. She earned a second M.A. from the University of California at Los Angeles in history, minoring in anthropology and women’s studies. She pursued course work toward a doctorate in American studies at the University of New Mexico, combining her twin interests in history and literature, receiving her Ph.D. in 1995. The mother of four children, Ponce delayed the start of her writing career until she was in her forties, beginning to publish 514

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The funeral mass was offered free of charge; the cemetery plot was paid for in installments. The mortuary bill, which included la carroza and the coffin, was also to be paid in installments. . . . Early on it was decided that Rito’s wake would be held in our front room. My siblings and cousins put things in order. They cleaned and dusted, wanting the sala to look worthy of my brother. —from “The Day Rito Died”

short stories in Spanish in the early 1980’s. She soon wrote stories in English and translated some of her Spanish stories into English. She has published nonfiction essays on Latino topics (“Latinas and Breast Cancer,” for example) and interviews of Latino figures (“Profile of Dr. Shirlene Soto: Vice Provost, CSU Northridge”). She has also given presentations on such topics as Spanish American pioneer women in California, Chicana literature, and oral history. She has read her fiction at college campuses and conferences in the United States and El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City and has published in the largest Spanishlanguage newspaper in Southern California, La Opinión. Recuerdo: Short Stories of the Barrio gathers a number of Ponce’s earliest pieces, some of which begin with the Spanish word “Recuerdo,” which may be translated as “I recall,” “I remember,” or simply “memory,” suggesting the autobiographical element typical of Ponce’s writing. Her early narratives are first-person, allowing Ponce to describe the experiences of Mexican women with an intimate tone. Later some of Ponce’s stories would employ third-person narration. Taking Control contains several short narratives. Though the characters of these stories are often subject to difficult circumstances, Ponce’s title reflects her decision to emphasize the positive outcomes of even the most negative circumstances. Both Recuerdo and Taking Control are firmly anchored in the Mexican American experience, particularly as lived by women. 515

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The Wedding The Wedding (1989) is dedicated to “the chicks and guys from the barrios who remember the big, fun weddings . . . and fights.” The book follows the life of Blanca Munoz, who lives in Taconos, a poor Chicano neighborhood not far from Los Angeles. Like many of her peers, Blanca lives in a single-parent home and drops out of school to look for work. She is young and uneducated and finally has to take a job at a turkey-processing plant while she imagines a better life. She meets Cricket, the leader of the local gang, the Tacones. Although she calls him honey, their relationship seems based more on proximity than on love. Blanca and Cricket focus much more on the impending wedding as a social symbol than as the symbol of their union. Each wants a splendid wedding for different reasons: Cricket wants to raise his status among the gang members with a wedding that “would outclass all others”; Blanca wants to salvage the family’s pride, increase its social status and, consequently, please her mother. Father Ranger, the parish priest, reluctantly agrees to perform the wedding. “Married men come and go at will,” says Father Ranger. “They are free to find other women, abandon wives and children at whim, then return to claim their rights.” Blanca constantly acquiesces to Cricket. She hopes for a single night of honeymoon at a hotel, but Cricket refuses, explaining that first he has to take care of the dance. On the way to the dance, as his new bride leans against him, Cricket admonishes her not to wrinkle his clothes. He knows he will be facing the rival gang and must look his best. As the novel closes, Cricket is carried to the hospital in an ambulance after the rumble, and Blanca is taken to the hospital suffering a miscarriage. She still has hopes for a good future with Cricket. Her last words before passing out are “the best wedding, in all of Taconos.” — Linda Ledford-Miller

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Ponce’s novel The Wedding is set in a fictional small-town neighborhood near Los Angeles. It depicts the San Fernando Valley in the 1940’s and 1950’s while exploring women’s place in Mexican American society of the time. Blanca is planning the wedding of her dreams, although the marriage is not necessarily to the man of her dreams. She has to work Saturdays plucking turkeys in order to pay for the fancy gown she wants, despite its reduced, factory-seconds price. Her fiancé is a pachuco, or zoot-suitwearing member of a 1950’s gang. Blanca does have her fancy wedding—but she also has a miscarriage and has to leave the party in an ambulance as two rival gangs fight in the background. Like many of Ponce’s other works, The Wedding examines the stereotypes that seem to circumscribe the lives of Mexican American women, who are subject to their husband’s whims, who endure multiple pregnancies, and who must rise to the social expectations inculcated in them by their families and the Catholic church. Nonetheless, Blanca, like other Ponce characters, is strong, tough, and essentially optimistic. A panorama of Mexican American life is presented in the book: the gangs; the hardworking women; the swaggering men; the influences of family, friends, and church; the financial struggle; and the changing culture. Ponce’s 1993 nonfiction work Hoyt Street: An Autobiography returns to the San Fernando Valley of the 1940’s. (The book was reprinted in 1995 simultaneously in Spanish and English editions: Hoyt Street: Memories of a Chicana Childhood and Calle Hoyt: Memorias de una juventud chicana.) Hoyt Street leaves fiction behind to tell Ponce’s own story of growing up Chicana in a bilingual, bicultural neighborhood whose population is gradually acculturating to the dominant Anglo culture. The book begins with Ponce as a preschooler and ends at the beginning of puberty, depicting the neighborhood and introducing friends and family as it goes. Though her memories are mostly happy ones, Ponce comments: “It seems that we Mexican-Americans, as we were called, had so many things wrong with us that I wondered why it was we were happy.” The voice is Ponce’s, but the vision is split between her own childhood recollections and the implied critique by Anglos. It is in this matrix of identities (Mexican, Mexican American, Anglo-American, Spanish language, English language) and is517

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sues (the socialization of men and women, the church, school) that Ponce positions all of her writing. It has been remarked that minority writers usually begin their careers by writing their autobiography and only then move toward less personalized fictions. Ponce’s fiction, however, has always had autobiographical elements, and she moved through fictional representation to the nonfiction autobiography itself. — Linda Ledford-Miller Learn More Gonzalez, Maria C. Contemporary Mexican-American Women Novelists: Toward a Feminist Identity. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Ponce is one of the authors included in this feminist critique of Chicana novelists. Ikas, Karin Rosa, ed. Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002. Lorna Dee Cervantes, Denise Chávez, Lucha Corpi, and Mary Helen Ponce are among the ten Chicana writers who describe their lives and work. McCracken, Ellen. New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999. Ponce’s work is included in this analysis of writing by Cuban American, Puerto Rican American, Mexican American, and Dominican American writers. McCracken explains how these writers have redefined concepts of multiculturalism and diversity in American society. Ponce, Mary Helen. Hoyt Street: An Autobiography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. Ponce recalls her life in Pacoima, California, from the age of eight through thirteen, describing the poverty and prejudice—as well as the joys—of her childhood. Rochy, John. “A Pacoima Childhood.” Review of Hoyt Street, by Mary Helen Ponce. Los Angeles Times, October 3, 1993. A favorable review. Veyna, Angelina F. “Mary Helen Ponce.” In Chicano Writers, Second Series, edited by Francisco A. Lomelí. Vol. 122 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Group, 1992. Provides a biobibliographic overview of Ponce’s work up to The Wedding. 518

Elena Poniatowska Mexican journalist, novelist, and essayist Born: Paris, France; May 19, 1933 nonfiction: Palabras cruzadas, 1961; Todo empezó el domingo, 1963; La noche de Tlatelolco, 1971 (Massacre in Mexico, 1975); Fuerte es el silencio, 1980; Domingo siete, 1982; ¡Ay vida, no me mereces!, 1985; Nada, nadie: Las voces del temblor, 1988 (Nothing, Nobody: The Voices of the Mexico City Earthquake, 1995); Juchitán de las mujeres, 1989; Guerrero Viejo, 1997 (bilingual); Me lo dijo Elena Poniatowska, 1997 (interviews); Octavio Paz: Las palabras del árbol, 1998; Las mil y una: La herida de Paulina, 2000; Las siete cabritas, 2000; Mariana Yampolsky y la buganvillia, 2001. long fiction: Hasta no verte, Jesús mío, 1969 (Here’s to You, Jesusa!, 2001); La “Flor de Lis,” 1988; Tinísima, 1993 (Tinisima, 1996); Paseo de la Reforma, 1997; La piel del cielo, 2001 (The Skin of the Sky, 2004). short fiction: Lilus Kikus, 1954; Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela, 1978 (Dear Diego, 1986); De noche vienes, 1979; Tlapalería, 2003.

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lena Poniatowska (eh-LAY-nah poh-nyah-TOW-skah) is best known for her journalistic work, a career launched by chance when, in 1954, she interviewed the U.S. ambassador the day after meeting him at a cocktail party. Poniatowska has dedicated her writing to recording a wide spectrum of Mexican life, from the country’s power elite to marginalized peasant populations. In 1978 she became the first woman in Mexico awarded the Premio Nacional de Periodismo, the country’s most prestigious prize in journalism. Dialogue serves as a foundation for most of her literary production. Poniatowska’s first collection of interviews, Palabras cruzadas (crossed words), includes such varied personalities as Spanish film director Luis Buñuel, Argentine writer Jorge Luis 519

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Borges, and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. By contrast, Todo empezó el domingo (everything started on Sunday) celebrates the mundane Sunday outings of working-class Mexicans. The attention Poniatowska gives to the cross-section of social classes in Mexico reflects aspects of her own background. Poniatowska was born in Paris in 1933 of French-born parents whose families had been displaced by political upheaval. Her mother, Dolores de Amor, came from a Mexican family of hacienda owners who left for Europe when the government of Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated their land and instituted agrarian reform after the Mexican Revolution. Her paternal family of Polish aristocrats settled in France after fleeing Poland during World War II. When her own family moved to Mexico, Poniatowska was about nine years old and spoke only French. In fact, Poniatowska never studied Spanish in school and acquired the language from house maids. She attended French and English schools, one of which was a convent school in Pennsylvania. Since rigorous religious training instilled young women with selfsacrificing qualities, the fact that many nontraditional women populate her writing suggests the author’s rejection of customary female roles. Although Poniatowska grew up among the Mexican gentry, the household help exposed her to the problems of the workingclass poor. Furthermore, since from an early age Poniatowska witnessed her parents’ civic involvement and wartime service

Guerrero Viejo is a stone in the sun, a hard, implacable sun. The rocks in a row at the edge of the road like the earth’s teeth. Stone, the men’s heads, and stone, their bones, scattered there. Stone, their memory of themselves, of their lives that, for the uninitiated, leave no more of a trace than the rings in the water when a stone is dropped. —from Guerrero Viejo

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(her father fought in World War II, and her mother drove ambulances), it is not surprising that much of her journalistic work documents national crisis. The October, 1968, clash between police and student protesters at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City prompted Poniatowska to record the bloodbath in Massacre in Mexico. Fuerte es el silencio (silence is strong) incorporates other national concerns such as the influx of peasants into the capital in search of work, the miserable shantytown housing of these urban dwellers, the “disappeared” victims 521

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of political repression, and the struggle of rural communities to improve living conditions. The very title suggests the voicelessness of the unrepresented poor, a social ill Poniatowska denounces in her writing. In Nothing, Nobody Poniatowska turns from social inequities to natural disaster by recording the aftermath of the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City. Typically her journalistic texts feature mixed media, including accounts from news clips, eyewitness accounts, interviews, author narrative, and photographs. The interviews of the seven 1982 presidential candidates compiled in Domingo siete (Sunday the seventh) suggest the importance of politics in Mexican society. The country’s intelligentsia also command a space in Poniatowska’s writing. The essays in ¡Ay vida, no me mereces! (oh, life, you do not deserve me!) delve into the work of prominent contemporary writers Rosario Castellanos, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos Fuentes. A feminist, Poniatowska shows a predilection for Castellanos’s writing, which takes a stand on women’s issues. Themes relating to women’s issues predominate in Poniatowska’s fiction writing. Her first book, Lilus Kikus, consists of short vignettes about the protagonist’s nonconformity with typical female socialization. Lilus likes to play outdoors and explore nature, but society dictates otherwise for girls. Fiction took a back seat to journalism until the publication of the testimonial novel Here’s to You, Jesusa!, which is based on a year’s worth of conversations with Josefina Bórquez, an extraordinary peasant woman. A staunch feminist by today’s standards, Jesusa Palancares—as Poniatowska renames her in the novel—fought in the Mexican Revolution alongside her father and husband, stood up to their abuse, liberated herself from male tutelage, and led an independent life. Again drawing from real life to construct fiction, in Dear Diego Poniatowska writes the series of letters she imagines that émigré Russian artist Angelina Beloff would have written to her lover, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, when he left Paris and returned to Mexico in 1921. The emotional dependence the heartbroken Quiela shows for Diego contrasts dramatically with the polygamous wife in the title story of De noche vienes (you come at night). Esmerald, a nurse by pro522

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Dear Diego Dear Diego (1978) is based on one chapter of Bertram Wolfe’s The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera (1963). It is a fictionalized portrayal of the Russian painter Angelina Beloff as a broken-hearted lover waiting for the painter Diego Rivera to send for her from Mexico City. At first Angelina, or Quiela (the Spanish name given to her by Diego), is confident that her lover will send for her. They share a ten-year union and the tragic memory of a child lost to a terrible fever. She continues to paint in his absence but cannot recapture the joys of creation that Diego’s presence made possible. In a desperate attempt to bring his spirit back, she turns her letters into monologues that review the comradeship and poverty of their life together. Because Diego’s Mexican sensibility has, in a sense, replaced her Russian soul, she becomes almost crazed by loneliness and lost identity. Instead of losing him in the Paris crowds, she “recognizes” his face, with its warm smile, cresting the wave of faces pouring out of the Metro. Diego finally sends money orders accompanied by impersonal messages that are more painful than was silence. To add to her suffering, Diego asks Angelina to pass on money to another former mistress, a promiscuous woman who has earned Angelina’s disdain. Instead of succumbing to jealousy, Angelina throws herself into her painting and overcomes her despair through a rediscovery of her artistic independence and creative will. Most of the novel is epistolary, but it ends with a short narrative that presents a curious paradox of reconciliation. Although Diego never sends for her, and years later does not even recognize her at a concert in Mexico City, Angelina has turned his rejection of her into a source of inspiration. Deprived of his companionship, she has internalized his power and enlarged her own capacities. He deserts her, but Diego—that genius with a “large belly”— has also given birth to her artist’s soul.

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fession, epitomizes the traditional caretaker role of females—so much so that she manages to keep five husbands until getting caught. Poniatowska applies a humorous feminist spin to machismo’s double standard. Autobiographical similarities abound in La “Flor de Lis.” An aristocratic child, Mariana, lives in France surrounded by luxury and servants until World War II changes her family’s lifestyle. Mariana’s French father leaves for the war, while her Mexican mother sets off for exile in Mexico with two young daughters. The narrative focuses on the class and gender traditions that shape Mariana’s cultural identity in the new country. Whether focusing on the uniqueness of one woman, as in Tinísima, the story of early twentieth century photographer and political militant Tina Modotti, or of village women, as in Juchitán de las mujeres (the women’s Juchitán), Poniatowska’s writings typically inscribe the cultural contributions of the underrepresented in Mexican society. — Gisela Norat Learn More Amador Gómez-Quintero, Raysa Elena, and Mireya Pérez Bustillo. The Female Body: Perspectives of Latin American Artists. Foreword by Elena Poniatowska. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Examines the works of Poniatowska and other women writers to determine how they represent themselves and treat female identity and the female body. Franco, Jean. “Rewriting the Family: Contemporary Feminism’s Revision of the Past.” In Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Discusses the unconventionality of both protagonists and genre categories. Hurley, Teresa M. Mothers and Daughters in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Literature. Rochester, N.Y.: Tamesis, 2002. Explores the myths about women that were prevalent in Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century and examines how women writers debunked those myths. Includes an analysis of the treatment of mother, country, and identity in Poniatowska’s La “Flor de Lis.” 524

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Jörgensen, Beth Ellen. The Writing of Elena Poniatowska: Engaging Dialogues. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. A study of the whole range of Poniatowska’s work, focusing on how Poniatowska’s work as a journalist informs her fiction. Medeiros-Lichem, María Teresa. Reading the Feminine Voice in Latin American Women’s Fiction: From Teresa de la Parra to Elena Poniatowska and Luisa Valenzuela. New York: P. Lang, 2002. Focuses on Poniatowska’s fiction, providing a feminist critique of her work. Poniatowska, Elena. “How I Started Writing Chronicles and Why I Never Stopped.” In The Contemporary Mexican Chronicle: Theoretical Perspectives on the Liminal Genre, edited by Ignacio Corona and Beth E. Jörgensen. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. An examination of the crónica or chronicle, a popular literary genre in Latin America that combines fiction and nonfiction, literature and journalism. The essays by Poniatowska and other authors describe the theory and practice of this genre in the twentieth century. Schaefer, Claudia. Textured Lives: Women, Art, and Representation in Modern Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992. Explores Poniatowska’s use of the epistolary genre in reconstructing true-to-life protagonists. Von Son, Carlos. Deconstructing Myths: Parody and Irony in Mexican Literature. New Orleans, La.: University Press of the South, 2002. Analyzes Poniatowska’s Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela and works by three other writers to determine if these writers’ use of parody and irony is unique to Mexican literature.

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Manuel Puig Argentine novelist Born: General Villegas, Argentina; December 28, 1932 Died: Cuernavaca, Mexico; July 22, 1990 long fiction: La traición de Rita Hayworth, 1968 (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, 1971); Boquitas pintadas, 1969 (Heartbreak Tango, 1973); The Buenos Aires Affair: Novela policial, 1973 (The Buenos Aires Affair: A Detective Novel, 1976); El beso de la mujer araña, 1976 (Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1979); Pubis angelical, 1979 (English translation, 1986); Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas, 1980 (Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages, 1982); Sangre de amor correspondido, 1982 (Blood of Requited Love, 1984); Cae la noche tropical, 1988 (Tropical Night Falling, 1991). drama: Bajo un manto de estrellas, pb. 1983 (Under a Mantle of Stars, 1985); El beso de la mujer araña, pb. 1983 (Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1986; adaptation of his novel); Misterio del ramo de rosas, pb. 1987 (Mystery of the Rose Bouquet, 1988). screenplays: Boquitas pintadas, 1974 (adaptation of his novel); El lugar sin límites, 1978 (adaptation of José Donoso’s novel).

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anuel Puig (mah-NWEHL pweeg), one of Latin America’s major writers and one of the most widely read, has been called the chronicler of middle-class Argentina. Born in the provincial town of General Villegas, where he spent his childhood and received his elementary education, Puig was the son of Baldomero Puig, who worked in commerce, and Elena Delledonne. He began learning English at the age of ten to enhance his enjoyment of the American films that he and his mother saw every afternoon. Within a year, Puig was at the top of his class and had added to his interest in American films new interests in literature, philosophy, psychology, and Italian films. His ambition as a teenager was to become a film director.

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In 1957, after having studied philosophy, languages, and literature in Argentina, he traveled to Rome with a scholarship to study at the Experimental Film Center; however, he was dissatisfied with the school and moved on to Paris, and then to London, where he earned a living by giving Spanish and Italian lessons as well as by washing dishes at the theater restaurant. During this time, Puig began writing film scripts; he continued to do so in 1959, when he moved to Stockholm. A year later, upon his return to Argentina, he obtained a position as assistant director in the Argentine film industry. After a short stay in his native country, he moved to New York City to expose himself to Broadway musicals, and he worked as a ticket agent for Air France. In 1965 he completed his first novel, which he had begun in 1962 but which was not to be published in Buenos Aires until 1968, partly because of problems with censorship. With the publication of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Puig was immediately heralded as one of Latin America’s most gifted writers. Most critics still consider this first novel to be his masterpiece. In addition to its penetrating examination of the narrow world of alienated human beings (particularly the petit bourgeois and blue-collar Argentine people) who find refuge in the large-scale consumption of films and soap operas, the work was considered to be an attack on conventional or naïve realism as

—Mmm. . . . It must be a fear that you’ll turn into a panther, like with the first movie you told me. —I’m not the panther woman. —It’s true, you’re not the panther woman. —It’s very sad being a panther woman; no one can kiss you. Or anything. —You, you’re the spider woman, that traps men in her web. —from Kiss of the Spider Woman (trans. Thomas Colchie)

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well as on the cultural foundations of the experimental novel. His second novel, Heartbreak Tango, became an instant bestseller when it was published in 1969. Written in the format of popular literature, each chapter was intended to be read as an episode in a serialized story. Yet the novel is a parody of the feuilleton (serialized novel) as, for example, written by Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870). Avoiding the sentimentalism characteristic of the feuilleton, Puig reveals the lives of the story’s protagonists through intimate letters, meditations, dialogues, religious confessions, prayers, and objective descriptions. Puig’s third novel, The Buenos Aires Affair, illustrates in its subtitle, A Detective Novel, that the author was again using a popular literary form. Aside from the detective elements, the novel is primarily a psychoanalytic study of its two main characters and a parody of their way of life. As in his two previous novels, Puig’s major triumph is on the linguistic level. The book was not a popular success. The Argentine military dictatorship refused to recognize itself in the mirror of Puig’s novel. In Kiss of the Spider Woman, Puig develops subjects which he had touched upon in his earlier novels: politics and sexuality. The drama, polarized between two male protagonists—one a homosexual and the other a political prisoner—focuses on the relationship between the two men in their shared jail cell. Although footnotes pretend to document events, the story appears to be narrated by the two protagonists themselves. Readers are left to their own interpretations of the characters and events portrayed. Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages, originally written in English, is a novel that takes Puig’s narrative discourse to even further lengths. The story of two lonely men, one an old Argentine gentleman, the other his American nurse, and their search for friendship and love is rendered entirely through dialogue. As the narrative progresses, however, the dialogues do not appear to move forward in any apparent order; consequently, readers may begin to question whether they are really confronted with two speakers or with only one who is engaged in dialogue with an imaginary other. In Blood of Requited Love, Puig introduces his readers to a new fictional locale: a small rural town 529

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Heartbreak Tango Heartbreak Tango (1969) was an immediate best-seller when it appeared. It takes the form of an old-fashioned installment novel, and the reader is drawn along by two major lines of development: how a wondrously handsome young man of a fairly good family came to an impoverished, tubercular end, and how the tense relations between a housemaid and her upwardly mobile seducer culminated in the latter’s murder. Further interest comes from following the fates of three other young women: the handsome young rake’s scheming sister; a local cattle baron’s daughter, who rendezvouses with the rake while waiting to marry into the landed aristocracy; and another of the hero’s conquests, an ambitious blonde who can never manage to rise above the lower middle class. While well-educated urban readers might see the book as turning the members of the provincial middle class into figures of fun, such a reading fails to take into account the great amount of material dedicated to the exploration of Puig’s twin themes of popular culture and concepts of sexuality. Language is an especially important

in Brazil. A lost or forgotten past (specifically, the lustful youth of the protagonist), gradually emerges into a desolate present. The novel ends with both a celebration of adolescent sexuality and an elegy in acknowledgment of its demise. Beneath the disguise of popular literature, in his fiction Puig built an elaborate kind of narrative structure in which each element functions in perfect harmony with the totality of which it is a part. While Puig’s countrymen relegated him to the category of “second-class sentimentalist,” American critics, for the most part, received Puig’s works favorably. They assert that Puig is a writer keenly conscious of how both the novel as a literary form and the kinds of people who serve as its subjects have been 530

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tool, and the characters use the media’s phrases, though their own existence has little to do with and the rapturous, adventurous, or “macho” expressions they employ. The incongruity is especially acute in the area of courtship mores, and the reader sees a small society in which both marriage and informal liaisons are heavily governed by questions of prestige and economic power, while the characters see love through a haze of dreamily romantic phrases. On the surface, the unmarried women are expected to remain chaste, while men are given more leeway, although they are required to satisfy conditions of respectability. Overlapping this Victorian standard is the code of machismo, which demands of the young men a constant effort to conquer numbers of women and to cultivate a swaggering style. Of the various liaisons contracted during the novel, all are somehow colored by the dream of acquiring an advantageous match in marriage. Puig is unmistakably critical of this scenario, in which sex and courtship are made part of the politics of class standing. He offers a condemnatory portrait of this system, making his attitude clear by portraying popular culture as stressing the acquisition of an impressive lover or spouse. — Naomi Lindstrom

caught up in the clichés of popular literature. While some critics say that Puig’s stylistic methods are, at times, too inventive and even superfluous, others say that Puig’s extraordinary inventiveness demonstrates new ways of rendering familiar material, thereby making accessible a reality that might have remained inaccessible through other narrative angles. — Genevieve Slomski and Christine R. Catron Learn More Bacarisse, Pamela. Impossible Choices: The Implications of the Cultural References in the Novels of Manuel Puig. Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 1993. An excellent critical study 531

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of Puig’s work. Includes bibliographical references and an index. _______. The Necessary Dream: A Study of the Novels of Manuel Puig. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1988. Chapters on the major novels. The introduction provides a useful overview of Puig’s career and themes. Includes notes and bibliography. Colas, Santiago. Postmodernity in Latin America: The Argentine Paradigm. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994. Puig is discussed in this study of Argentine works, which also examines Julio Cortázar and Ricardo Piglia. Kerr, Lucille. Suspended Fictions: Reading Novels by Manuel Puig. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Chapters on each of Puig’s major novels, exploring the themes of tradition, romance, popular culture, crime, sex, and the design of Puig’s career. Contains detailed notes but no bibliography. Lavers, Norman. Pop Culture into Art: The Novels of Manuel Puig. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988. Lavers finds a close relationship between Puig’s life and his literary themes. Biography, in this case, helps to explain the author’s methods and themes. Levine, Suzanne Jill. Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. A full-length biography by one of Puig’s translators, focusing on the intersections between his life and his art. Tittler, Jonathan. Manuel Puig. New York: Twayne, 1993. The best introduction to Puig. Tittler provides a useful survey of Puig’s career in his introduction and devotes separate chapters to the novels. Includes detailed notes and an annotated bibliography.

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Rachel de Queiroz Brazilian novelist Born: Fortaleza, Brazil; November 17, 1910 Died: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; November 4, 2003 long fiction: O quinze, 1930; João Miguel, 1932; Caminho de pedras, 1937; As três Marias, 1939 (The Three Marias, 1963); Dôra, Doralina, 1975 (English translation, 1984); O galo de ouro, 1985; Memorial de Maria Moura, 1992. drama: Lampião, pr., pb. 1953; A beata Maria do Egito, pr., pb. 1958. children’s literature: O menino mágico, 1969; Cafute e Pena-dePrata, 1986; Andira, 1992. nonfiction: A donzela e a moura torta, 1948; 100 crônicas escolhidas, 1958; Histórias e crônicas, 1963; O Brasileiro perplexo, 1964; O caçador de Tatu, 1967; As menininhas, e outras crônicas, 1976; Mapinguari: Crônicas, 1989; Matriarcas do Ceara: Don Federalina de Lavras, 1990; As terras asperas, 1993; O nosso Ceará, 1994 (with Maria Luiza de Queiroz); Tantos anos, 1998 (with Maria Luiza de Queiroz); O Não me Deixes, 2000 (with Maria Luiza de Queiroz). miscellaneous: Obra reunida, 1989 (5 volumes).

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achel de Queiroz (rah-SHEHL thay kay-ee-RAWSH) is regarded as a significant voice of neoregionalism in Brazil and as a protofeminist writer. She was born in the capital city of the state of Ceará in Brazil’s northeastern region, the setting of most of her fiction. After the great drought of 1915, her family moved to Rio de Janeiro and then to Belém do Pará. Returning to Fortaleza, she graduated from a Catholic girls’ school in 1925 and two years later began work as a journalist. Throughout her career she has written crônicas, the Brazilian genre of commentary, social observation, or sketches of life and customs. At the age of twenty, Queiroz published her first novel, which received a national book award. Like many intellectuals of the day concerned with 533

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Dôra, Doralina The action of Dôra, Doralina (1975) is located in the consciousness of the protagonist, Maria das Dores (nicknamed Dôra or Doralina). The novel’s first section revolves around Dôra’s bitter struggle with her mother, Senhora. A beautiful widow, Senhora tyrannically manages the family ranch, Soledade, while showing no love toward her daughter, and the depth of Dôra’s alienation is evidenced in Dôra’s desperate need to be loved. This desire seems to be realized when she marries Laurindo Quirino, but soon she realizes that he is a violent, morally hollow opportunist. Dôra discovers that he is having an affair with her mother. Dôra is shattered by this revelation, and her sense of imprisonment deepens, only lessening when her husband is killed in a mysterious hunting accident. No longer able to tolerate her mother, Dôra leaves the ranch and moves to the city. The second section of the novel describes how she escapes her haunted past. Dôra joins a ragtag theater group as a fledgling actress and be-

social issues, she had a brief association with the Communist Party (1931-1933) and faced imprisonment for expressing her ideas. In the late 1930’s Queiroz moved permanently to Rio de Janeiro, but she continued to make annual visits to the family ranch in the interior of Ceará. In recognition of her defense of the disadvantaged she was chosen to represent her country at the 1966 United Nations Commission on Human Rights, after which she joined the Federal Council of Culture. In 1977 she became the first woman to be elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Queiroz is noted for her profound understanding of the language, landscape, and human drama of northeastern Brazil. The second generation of Brazilian Modernism, which included such authors as Jorge Amado, was characterized by the nationally focused social novel of the 1930’s. As a member of this gen534

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gins experiencing the larger world. The company gives her the sense of family that she has always desired. Eventually, Dôra meets the man who fulfills her dreams: Asmodeu Lucas, a river captain. Their relationship is the heart of the novel’s final section. When the pressures of World War II force the theater group to disperse, Dôra and the Captain begin to live together in teeming Rio de Janeiro. The two remain in love, and the novel climaxes with the Captain’s death from typhoid. Unable to cope with her grief in Rio, Dôra returns to the more familiar solitude of the ranch and becomes the new Senhora. Queiroz’s artistic vision resists morbidity because it vividly depicts the characters’ deep-seated need to struggle against time. This struggle enlivens the novel, especially since Queiroz plays the comic second section off the tragic first and third parts. There is a kind of tragic exultation in Dôra’s persistent, unsparing, and honest attempt to remember and to confront her ever-fading past. By trying to rescue her memories—an act which brings more pain to her already desolate existence on the ranch—she rejects the temptation to give in to time. — James Grove

eration, Queiroz sought to bring pressing issues to light in honest examinations of conditions in her land of birth. Themes of social conflict, poverty, and forced migration structure Queiroz’s fiction. The physical and mental suffering caused by drought is examined in O quinze (fifteen, or 1915), which is based on firsthand acquaintance with the people and places of the backlands and cities affected by the drought. In the face of wretched situations Queiroz avoids defeatism, preferring to portray the stoicism of the people. In João Miguel (John Michael) she turns to the social psychology of violence in the backlands. The novel is a study of a protagonist who is imprisoned for murder. Caminho de pedras (road of stones), more historically oriented, presents the persecution of political dissidents and organizers. Queiroz examines, in a provincial situation, stages of development, class 535

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He snooped around and found a postcard and a book, both with a man’s name in the same handwriting. He found the insignia of the sergeant’s regiment and concluded that the object of his wife’s murmurs, sighs, and silences was not only a man but a soldier. Finally he made the supreme discovery. . . . For he discovered the love letters, bearing airmail stamps, a distant postmark, and the sergeant’s name. —from “Metonymy: Or, The Husband’s Revenge” (trans. William L. Grossman)

structure, and relations of power. While less distinguished than her fiction, Queiroz’s dramatic works also concern the problematic Northeast. Social banditry and heroic folk verse emerge in a play based on the life of a famous renegade, Lampião. A beata Maria do Egito (Saint Mary of Egypt) relates hagiological legend to parallel circumstances in Brazil. Queiroz is also known for her treatment of women’s issues, which are in varying degrees important in all of her fictional works. The protagonist of O quinze is a young woman who strives for an independent position in the midst of general crisis. The oppression of women is also taken up in the social portrait of Caminho de pedras. Such issues are at the fore of Queiroz’s two works which have appeared in English. The protagonists of The Three Marias confront life in the fictional present through reminiscences about adolescent experiences in a convent school. The novel details their attempts to deal with current frustrations and to come to terms with their sexuality and their roles as citizens, mothers, and spouses. Queiroz addresses the inadequacies of the educational system, especially with regard to women, the inequalities of male-female relations, and the difficulties of emancipation. In Dôra, Doralina a retrospective narrative technique is again adopted. The heroines’ trajectories are presented in three “books,” or stages of life, as the relations of mother, daughter, and a male figure are examined. The women confront traditional 536

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values and interpersonal problems from different generational perspectives. Here one senses more positive imaging of self and greater potential for freedom and fulfillment. Queiroz’s gallery of strong female characters continues in Memorial de Maria Moura (Maria Moura’s memorial), a novel about a woman who leads a group of cangaceiros (bandits) in the backlands of Ceará. Rachel de Queiroz occupies a dual position in the Brazilian canon. Besides having a significant role in the regionalist novel of the 1930’s, she was one of the very first to integrate gender issues into Brazilian fiction. She is thus a forerunner of contemporary writers who probe the social psychology of women’s roles and dramatize their conflicts. — Charles A. Perrone and Cristina Ferreira-Pinto Learn More Courteau, Joanna. “Dôra, Doralina: The Sexual Configuration of Discourse.” Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 20 (May, 1991): 3-9. A discussion of the narrative style of the novel, Queiroz’s treatment of the character, Dôra Maria das Dores, and a psychoanalytic examination of the book. _______. “The Problematic Heroines in the Novels of Rachel de Queiroz.” Luso Brazilian Review 22 (Winter, 1985): 123-144. An excellent analysis of the women characters and the female problematic in Queiroz’s novels. Ellison, Fred P. “Rachel de Queiroz.” In Brazil’s New Novel: Four Northeastern Masters. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954. A good starting point for study of Queiroz’s early work, particularly in the context of the 1930’s Brazilian social novel. _______. “Rachel de Queiroz.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. Offers a comprehensive and critical discussion of Queiroz’s life and works. Provides a selected bibliography for further reading. Wasserman, Renata R. “A Woman’s Place: Rachel de Queiroz’s Dôra, Doralina.” Brasileira: A Journal of Brazilian Literature 2 (1989): 46-58. A discussion of the role of women in Brazilian society as reflected in Dôra, Doralina. 537

Horacio Quiroga Uruguayan short-story writer Born: El Salto, Uruguay; December 31, 1878 Died: Buenos Aires, Argentina; February 19, 1937 Also known as: Horacio Silvestre Quiroga y Forteza short fiction: Los arrecifes de coral, 1901; El crimen del otro, 1904; Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte, 1917; Cuentos de la selva para los niños, 1918 (South American Jungle Tales, 1923); El salvaje, 1920; Anaconda, 1921; El desierto, 1924; La gallina degollada, 1925 (The Decapitated Chicken, and Other Stories, 1976); Los desterrados, 1926 (The Exiles, and Other Stories, 1987); Más allá, 1935. long fiction: Historia de un amor turbio, 1908; Pasado amor, 1929.

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oracio Quiroga (hoh-RAH-syoh kee-ROH-gah) holds much the same position in Spanish American literature as does Edgar Allan Poe in North American letters. Like Poe, whom Quiroga admired and who influenced the Uruguayan writer’s work significantly, Quiroga dedicated his literary efforts almost entirely to the short-story genre, and in the process he not only penned some of the most famous and most anthologized stories to be found in Spanish American literature but also wrote about the genre, even offering a decalogue of suggestions to other writers on how they should approach writing the short story. Quiroga published approximately two hundred short stories, many of which are considered classics within the Spanish American literary canon. Most of the author’s stories, classics or not, fall within one (or more) of the following three general categories: Poesque stories of horror, often punctuated by madness and/or genetic defect; stories of human beings against a savage and thoroughly unromanticized nature; and Kiplingesque animal stories that frequently contain an underlying moral mes538

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sage. The vast majority of Quiroga’s stories are dramatic, intense, even memorable tales that captivate the reader and in general reveal a true master of the genre at work. Two elements played significant roles in Horacio Quiroga’s life and also frequently find their way into some of the writer’s most famous stories. These two elements are tragic violence and the Uruguayan author’s fascination with the jungle-filled Mi-

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“The Decapitated Chicken” “The Decapitated Chicken” opens with a couple’s four “idiot” sons seated on a bench on a patio, their tongues sticking out, their eyes staring off into space. The couple had hoped for a “normal” child and each blamed the other for the defective genes that produced the “idiot” sons. Finally, the couple’s fifth child, a daughter, is “normal.” She receives all the couple’s attention, while the sons are relegated to the care of a servant. One day, the four sons wander into the kitchen as the servant is cutting the head off of a chicken to prepare it for lunch. Later, by accident, both the sons and the daughter are left unattended. The daughter attempts to climb the garden wall on the patio, where her brothers sit, her neck resting on the top as she works to pull herself up the wall. Captivated, the sons drag her into the kitchen and behead her just as the servant beheaded the chicken. This story features several classic Quiroga traits, including the early mention of something that will be important later in the story—the decapitation of the chicken. The narrator mentions that, though believed incapable of true learning, the four sons do possess a limited ability to imitate things that they see—again the decapitation of the chicken. This story also demonstrates Quiroga’s penchant for surprise and horrifying endings, endings that place Quiroga among the best writers of this type of tale. — Keith H. Brower 540

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siones region of northern Argentina. The first of these elements, tragic violence, punctuates Quiroga’s life—so much so, in fact, that were his biography offered as fiction, it would almost certainly be roundly criticized for being unbelievable, for no one’s life, in the real world, could be so tragically violent, especially when a good portion of said violence comes through accident. The author’s fascination with the harsh jungles of Misiones cost him at least one wife and possibly a second in real life, while this unforgiving environment provided him at the same time with the setting and thematic point of departure for many of his most famous stories. Quiroga was born on December 31, 1878, in El Salto, Uruguay, the youngest of four children born to Prudencio Quiroga and Pastora Forteza. Three months after Horacio’s birth, don Prudencio was killed when his hunting rifle went off accidentally as he was stepping from a boat. Quiroga’s mother, doña Pastora, ashore with infant son Horacio in her arms, witnessed the tragic event and fainted, dropping her son to the ground. Later the same year, doña Pastora moved the family to the Argentine city of Córdoba. She remarried in 1891, taking Ascencio Barcos as her second husband, and the family moved to Montevideo, Uruguay. On a September afternoon in 1896, don Ascencio, having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage earlier, took his own life with a shotgun. Seventeen-year-old Horacio was the first to arrive on the scene. Personal tragedy followed Quiroga in 1901 with the death of both his brother Prudencio and his sister Pastora. Then in 1902, the budding writer, who had published his first book, Los arrecifes de coral (coral reefs), the previous year, accidentally shot and killed one of his closest friends and literary companions, Federico Ferrando. After teaching off and on for several years in Buenos Aires, in September of 1909 Quiroga married Ana María Cirés and moved with her to San Ignacio, in the Misiones section of Argentina. Quiroga had first visited this jungle hinterland in 1903, with friend and Argentine writer Leopoldo Lugones. Enamored of the region, he bought land there in 1906 and divided his time between Misiones and Buenos Aires for the rest of his life. In 1915, unable to cope with the hardships 541

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Once the snakes decided that they would give a costume ball; and to make the affair a truly brilliant one they sent invitations to the frogs, the toads, the alligators and the fish. The fish replied that since they had no legs they would not be able to do much dancing, whereupon, as a special courtesy to them, the ball was held on the shore of the Paraná. —from “How the Flamingoes Got Their Stockings”

of living in the jungle, Ana María poisoned herself, leaving Quiroga a widower with the couple’s two children. The following year, the writer returned to Buenos Aires, and over the next ten years he saw the publication of his most famous collections of stories, Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte (stories of love, madness, and death), South American Jungle Tales, Anaconda, and The Exiles, and Other Stories, all the while moving periodically between the backlands and the Argentine capital. He remarried in 1927, taking a nineteen-year-old friend of his daughter as his second wife (he was forty-nine). Quiroga and his new wife moved to Misiones in 1931, but she returned to Buenos Aires with their infant daughter the following year. Quiroga’s health deteriorated significantly in 1934. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1936, where he was diagnosed with cancer in 1937. He took a lethal dose of cyanide to end his life in February of the same year. Quiroga is without a doubt one of the most highly regarded and most widely read short-story writers in the history of Spanish American literature and is considered by most to be the foremost Spanish American short-story writer prior to the arrival of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and other writers of the socalled new narrative on the Spanish American literary scene. While critical interest in Quiroga diminished during the Borges 542

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and post-Borges eras, the Uruguayan writer’s popularity among readers did not—all of which, perhaps, is just as well, for Quiroga’s stories, with rare exception the highly polished gems of a consummate short-story writer, lend themselves far more to reader enjoyment than to literary criticism. — Keith H. Brower Learn More Berg, Mary G. “Horacio Quiroga.” In Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities, edited by Lois Davis Vines. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. Berg explains how Quiroga was influenced by the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Brushwood, John S. “The Spanish American Short Story from Quiroga to Borges.” The Latin American Short Story: A Critical History, edited by Margaret Sayers Peden. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Brushwood dedicates a portion of this chapter to Quiroga. The critic comments on Quiroga’s place in the Spanish American short story, discusses the author’s decalogue for the perfect short-story writer, and considers various aspects of the stories “The Decapitated Chicken,” “Juan Darién,” and “The Dead Man.” Englekirk, John. “Horacio Quiroga.” In Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature. New York: Instituto de las Españas, 1934. In a lengthy study of Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on numerous Spanish and Spanish American writers, Englekirk dedicates his longest chapter to Poe’s influence on Quiroga. Peden, William. “Some Notes on Quiroga’s Stories.” Review 19 (Winter, 1976): 41-43. Peden reviews the chief characteristics of Quiroga’s stories and briefly refers to a number of stories that contain these characteristics. Succinct and on target, and especially useful for its English translation of Quiroga’s decalogue of the “Perfect Short Story Writer.” Published as part of a twenty-page “Focus” section on Quiroga. Pupo-Walker, Enrique. “The Brief Narrative in Spanish America: 1835-1915.” In The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. Vol. 1, edited by Robert González Echevarria and Enrique Pupo-Walker. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Provides a valuable historical and cultural 543

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context for Quiroga by charting the development of short narrative in Spanish America in the nineteenth century through the early part of the twentieth century. San Roman, Gustavo. “Amor Turbio, Paranoia, and the Vicissitudes of Manliness in Horacio Quiroga.” The Modern Language Review 90 (October, 1995): 919-934. Discusses the theme of love in Quiroga’s fiction, focusing on the novella Historia de un amor turbio. Comments on the links between the story and paranoia, and argues that Quiroga’s texts are more like those of a victim than those of a self-controlled author. Schade, George D. “Horacio Quiroga.” In Latin American Literature in the Twentieth Century: A Guide, edited by Leonard S. Klein. New York: Ungar, 1986. Largely a three-page version of Schade’s introduction to Margaret Sayers Peden’s The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories, listed below. Provides concise discussion of the writer’s life, career, and chief characteristics and limited consideration of specific stories. Includes a list of “Further Works” (most in Spanish) by Quiroga and a brief bibliography (most in Spanish). _______. Introduction to The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories. Edited and translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976. In this introduction to Peden’s English-language collection of twelve of Quiroga’s stories, Schade provides an introduction to Quiroga for the uninitiated reader, discussing the writer’s life and career and the chief characteristics of his works. In the process, he comments briefly on the stories included in the collection, among them “The Feather Pillow,” “The Decapitated Chicken,” “Drifting,” “Juan Darién,” “The Dead Man,” “Anaconda,” and “The Son.”

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John Rechy Mexican American novelist Born: El Paso, Texas; March 10, 1934 Also known as: John Francisco Rechy long fiction: City of Night, 1963; Numbers, 1967; This Day’s Death, 1970; The Vampires, 1971; The Fourth Angel, 1972; Rushes, 1979; Bodies and Souls, 1983; Marilyn’s Daughter, 1988; The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez, 1991; Our Lady of Babylon, 1996; The Coming of the Night, 1999; The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens, 2003. drama: Momma as She Became—Not as She Was, pr. 1978; Tigers Wild, pr. 1986. miscellaneous: The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary, a Non-fiction Account, with Commentaries, of Three Days and Nights in the Sexual Underground, 1977, revised 1985.

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ohn Francisco Rechy (REH-chee), son of Roberto Sixto Rechy and Guadalupe Flores de Rechy, was descended from Mexican and Anglo-Saxon forebears. Born in El Paso, Texas, he spoke Spanish until he began school. Rechy remained in El Paso for his undergraduate education, receiving his bachelor’s degree from Texas Western College. He continued his education at the New School for Social Research in New York City. His residence there shaped much of his future career as a novelist. Despite his Mexican background, Rechy, until the publication of The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez, drew less on Chicano themes than he did upon the acculturation he received in New York’s gay society in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. His writing career was bolstered in 1961 when his short story, “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny,” a gay-oriented story, received the Longview Foundation Fiction Prize. This award communicated to Rechy that he was an estimable writer and that a story focusing on gay topics could garner public recognition. 545

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Winning the Longview award led to Rechy’s obtaining a publishing contract for City of Night. He had begun it in 1959, but it remained unfinished until 1963. Much influenced by Tennessee Williams’s plays, particularly Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Rechy focuses in City of Night on the peregrinations and sexual adventures of a hustler who wanders from New York to the gay enclaves in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New Orleans. The first-person narration closely parallels Rechy’s own adventures during the 1950’s. When City of Night was published, the homosexual novel was still considered somewhat unusual, despite earlier appearances of works containing gay themes such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour (1934), Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948), and James

Tony Korody

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It should begin now, in the present present, when I am in seclusion in my quarters in the country, within the château of my beloved husband, the handsome Count du Muir, murdered in the Grand Cathedral by his twin brother, Alix, in collusion with their sister, Irena, and perhaps—yes!—the Pope himself. —from Our Lady of Babylon

Barr’s Quatrefoil (1950). Major publishers did not encourage such works, fearing the backlash they could unleash against their companies. The public had been somewhat enlightened by Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), but attitudes regarding gay behavior and identity regarded it as abnormal or deviant behavior. Rechy’s first novel, an immediate best-seller in the United States and abroad, is much in the eighteenth century picaresque tradition of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751). Episodic in its development, each portion is virtually a discrete entity welded to the whole by the unifying thread of first-person narration. Rechy, capitalizing on the book’s popularity and a more accepting public climate, in 1967 followed City of Night with Numbers, a gay novel in which the protagonist, Johnny Río, once a male prostitute in Los Angeles, returns after three years with the goal of making three conquests a day for ten days. Cruising Griffith Park, he easily achieves his aim, indeed exceeding it by seven. This novel, although it reached the best-seller list, evoked scorn from critics and dismay from many readers. It was widely viewed as borderline pornography rather than as Rechy’s existential revelations about a protagonist trying to thwart death by living riotously. 547

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City of Night John Rechy’s first and best-known novel, City of Night (1963) explores sexuality and spirituality as they develop during the protagonist’s quest for salvation. Combining Chicano heritage, autobiographical material, and a poetic rendering of the restless loneliness of America’s sexual underground, City of Night investigates difficulties and rewards of an individual’s search to claim the many identities that intersect in a single life. The unnamed protagonist’s journey begins with his childhood in El Paso, Texas. Rechy draws on stark, lonely imagery (the fiercely unforgiving wind, the father’s inexplicable hatred of his son, the mother’s hungry love) to portray a childhood and adolescence denied any sense of connection and certainty. Disconnected and detached from his home, the protagonist stands before the mirror confusing identity with isolation. He asserts a narcissistic removal from the world (“I have only me!”) that his quest at first confirms, then refutes. The first-person narrative chronicles the protagonist’s wanderings through New York City, Los Angeles, Hollywood, San Francisco, Chicago, and New Orleans. For Rechy, these various urban settings are “one vast City of Night” fused into the “unmistakable shape of loneliness.” Working as a male prostitute, the protagonist navigates this landscape, portraying the types of sexual and spiritual desperation he encounters along the way. His journey is a pilgrimage first away from home and then back to it, as he accepts the possibility that he might come to terms with his family, his childhood, and himself. City of Night interweaves chapters that describe the geographies of the cities the protagonist passes through with chapters that portray people condemned to these dark cities. Sometimes humorous, sometimes bitter, sometimes indifferent, these portraits of people trapped in the loneliness and cruelty of the cities mirror the protagonist’s quest. He is like and unlike the denizens of this world. — Daniel M. Scott III

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Perhaps stung by the reception of Numbers, Rechy next wrote This Day’s Death, a well-controlled bifurcated novel about the encroaching death of Jim Girard’s mother, a situation that parallels his trial on trumped-up charges of sexual perversion; although innocent, he is convicted. His conviction scuttles his hope of becoming an attorney and raises serious questions about whether the justice system works when homosexuality is part of the equation. The Vampires introduces gay themes and has a preponderance of gay characters, but it focuses more on evil than on the sexual matters Rechy emphasized in his earlier novels. The Fourth Angel, built around a teenage, thrill-seeking trio, the Angels, and its recruitment of a fourth Angel, Jerry, studies the dominant Angel, Shell, who rejects sentimentality in counterdistinction to the fourth Angel, Jerry, who needs love and epitomizes the softness that Shell disparages. A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1976 enabled Rechy to research his next book, The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary, which is alternately documentary and fictional. Rechy explores the psychology behind the gay male’s frantic search for homosexual encounters, finding it to be, at least in part, a way of rebelling against oppressive authority. Rushes is set in Rushes, a bar that attracts gays with leather and uniform fetishes, macho men who, although gay, are contemptuous of their orientation and of other gay men less butch than they are. In Bodies and Souls, a work strongly influenced by Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1954), the evangelistic protagonist is left a seven-figure bequest by a wily follower who attaches conditions to it, in much the way conditions were attached to the bequest in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit (1956). Rechy’s first book to reflect the Chicano viewpoint was The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez. Set in the Los Angeles barrio, it traces the life of a Chicano family in Los Angeles, incorporating not only working-class realism but also the magic realism of religious and Mexican fables. In 1996, Rechy again mixed realism and myth in Our Lady of Babylon, in which a woman accused of murdering her husband dreams of maligned women in history, only to discover that her 549

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dreams are memories of past lives. In 1999, The Coming of the Night, Rechy returned to his Los Angeles setting and some of his themes in City of Night to narrate the events of a windy day in 1981, at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, and a cast of gay characters who meet a group of gay bashers in a West Hollywood park. The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens, as its title suggests, traces the picaresque exploits of its protagonist from his conservative, fundamentalist Texas hometown to liberal, liberated Los Angeles. A winner of PEN West’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Rechy maintains an active career as writer, lecturer, and respected teacher of writing—although he remains true to his iconoclastic image. In the October 6, 2002, edition of the Los Angeles Times, he debunked the Terrible Three rules of writing: “Show, don’t tell”; “Write about what you know”; and “Always have a sympathetic character for the reader to relate to.” Rechy’s three: “[S]howing may be created through refined telling”; “Write about whatever you want”; and “Write about characters, good or evil, who fascinate.” — R. Baird Shuman Learn More Bredbeck, Gregory W. “John Rechy.” In Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Considers Rechy’s life, his works, and the reception of his writings. Casillo, Charles. Outlaw: The Lives and Careers of John Rechy. Los Angeles: Advocate Books, 2002. This full-length biography includes explorations of the street hustling, writing, and academic career of Rechy, and the inspirations and tensions created by living a life of contradictions. Also includes a look at Rechy’s unpublished works. Ortiz, Ricardo. “L.A. Women: Jim Morrison with John Rechy.” In The Queer Sixties, edited by Patricia Juliana Smith. New York: Routledge, 1999. Discusses the eroticism of life in Los Angeles’s 1960’s counterculture. Argues that the songs “L.A. Woman” and “Back Door Man” connect the Doors with Re550

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chy’s work, queer sexuality, the Beats, and the questioning of dominant ideas on popular culture. _______. “Sexuality Degree Zero.” Journal of Homosexuality 26 (August/September, 1993). Discusses pleasure and power in Rechy’s novels. Pérez-Torres, Rafael. “The Ambiguous Outlaw: John Rechy and Complicitious Homotextuality.” In Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities, edited by Peter F. Murphy. New York: New York University Press, 1994. An analysis of the treatment of homosexuality and masculinity in Rechy’s work, focusing on The Sexual Outlaw. Rechy, John. Interview by Debra Castillo. Diacritics 25 (Spring, 1995). Rechy discusses Latino culture, homosexuality, and critical work on his writings. _______. “John Rechy.” http://www.johnrechy.com/. Accessed March 22, 2005. This Web site includes summaries and reviews of each of his books, photos, and some of his thoughts on writing and on current events. Steuervogel, T. “Contemporary Homosexual Fiction and the Gay Rights Movement.” Journal of Popular Culture 20 (Winter, 1986). Relates Rechy’s writing to gay politics during the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

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Alfonso Reyes Mexican poet and critic Born: Monterrey, Mexico; May 17, 1889 Died: Mexico City, Mexico; December 27, 1959 poetry: Huellas, 1923; Ifigenia cruel, 1924; Pausa, 1926; Cinco casi sonetos, 1931; Romances del Rio de Enero, 1933; A la memoria de Ricardo Güiraldes, 1934; Golfo de Mexico, 1934 (Gulf of Mexico, 1949); Yerbas del Tarahumara, 1934 (Tarahumara Herbs, 1949); Infancia, 1935; Minuta, 1935; Otra voz, 1936; Cantata en la tumba de Federico García Lorca, 1937; Poema del Cid, 1938 (modern version of Cantar de mío Cid); Villa de Unión, 1940; Algunos poemas, 1941; Romances y afines, 1945; La vega y el soto, 1946; Cortesía, 1948; Homero en Cuernavaca, 1949; Obra poética, 1952. short fiction: El plano oblicuo, 1920; Quince presencias, 1955; Alfonso Reyes: Prosa y poesía, 1977 (includes “Major Aranda’s Hand,” “Silueta del indio Jesús,” and “El testimonio de Juan Peña”). translations: Viaje sentimental por Francia e Italia, 1919 (of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey); El candor de Padre Brown, 1921 (of G. K. Chesterton’s detective stories); Olalla, 1922 (of Robert Louis Stevenson’s stories); Historia de la literatura griega, 1948 (of C. M. Bowra’s Ancient Greek Literature); Eurípides y su época, 1949 (of Gilbert Murray’s Euripides and His Age); La Ilíada de Homero, 1951 (of Homer’s Iliad). nonfiction: Cuestiones estéticas, 1911; Cartones de Madrid, 1917; Visión de Anáhuac, 1917 (Vision of Anáhuac, 1950); Retratos reales e imaginarios, 1920; Simpatías y diferencias, 1921-1926; Cuestiones gongorinas, 1927; Discurso por Virgilio, 1933; Capítulos de literatura española, 1939; La crítica en la edad ateniense, 1941; La experiencia literaria, 1942; Ultima Thule, 1942; El deslinde: Prolegómenos a la teoría literaria, 1944; Grata compañía, 1948; The Position of America, and Other Essays, 1950 (includes Vision of Anáhuac); Árbol de pólvora, 1953; Parentalia: Primer libro 552

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de recuerdos, 1954; Albores: Segundo libro de recuerdos, 1960; Mexico in a Nutshell, and Other Essays, 1964. miscellaneous: Obras completas, 1955-1967.

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lfonso Reyes (al-FOHN-soh RAY-yays) wrote “the art of expression did not appear to me as a rhetorical function, independent of conduct, but a means of realizing human feeling.” Thus this Mexican writer defined and justified his literary vocation, so faithfully and completely fulfilled during the fifty years of his writing that he has justly been called “the most accomplished example of the man of letters in Mexico.” Born in Monterrey, capital of the state of Nuevo Leon, on May 17, 1889, he was the son of General Bernardo Reyes, at that time governor of the state and a prominent politician in the regime of President Porfirio Díaz. Having begun his schooling in his native city, Reyes moved later to Mexico City, where in 1913

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he received the professional title of lawyer. There he became part of a generation of writers engaged in a vigorous intellectual revolution that had enormous repercussions in Mexican culture. These writers were united in a movement called El Ateneo de la Juventud (The Athenaeum of Youth). Reyes was the youngest member of this group, and he labored side by side with other writers who became primary figures in the intellectual life of modern Mexico, including José Vasconcelos, Antonio Caso, Martín Luis Guzmán, and Enrique González Martínez. The basic aims of this group were the study and understanding of Mexican culture, the assimilation of the emerging post-positivist philosophies, and the development of literary criticism, all grounded in the universal ideas and values of the Enlightenment. The coming revolution, however, produced a rift among those aims: the dream of a harmonious insertion of the Mexican culture into the universal one proved complicated. Each member of the generation pursued his own path out of the impasse. Immersed in these intellectual currents, Reyes left for Europe in the service of Mexican diplomacy. In Madrid he collaborated with the emerging Center of Historical Studies under the direction of D. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, and he was also invited to contribute to the pages of El Sol, headed by José Ortega y Gasset. In 1939, after twenty-five years—except for a few intermissions—of diplomatic service, he returned to Mexico and pursued his literary activities with the greatest enthusiasm. Reyes used the presence in Mexico of exiled Spanish intellectuals to found El Colegio de México, which became the primary Mexican institution of higher learning. The Universities of California, Havana, and Mexico as well as Tulane, Harvard, and Princeton Universities conferred honorary degrees on him. In 1957, in recognition of his faithful and constant dedication to letters, he was named president of the Mexican Academy of Language, of which he had been a corresponding member since 1918. Reyes’s body of work is extensive. During his more than fifty years as a writer—in 1906, at the age of seventeen, he wrote his first sonnet, “Mercenario”—his indefatigable pen produced no fewer than three hundred titles, among them poems, criticism, 554

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Vision of Anáhuac Written in Madrid in 1915 and published in San José de Costa Rica two years later, Vision of Anáhuac, which appeared in English translation in the 1950 collection The Position of America, is one of those seminal works in which significance or influence bears no relationship to bulk. It is a prose poem, a landscape painting, a patriotic invocation, a study in history, an archaeological reconstruction, a literary critique, an exercise in style. The famous Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral called it the best single piece of Latin American prose. Anáhuac was the Nahuatl name for the Valley of Mexico, site of the great city of Tenochtitlán and the center of the Aztec civilization that fell to the conquistadores under Hernán Cortés in 1521. In a style that is subtle, evocative, and varied, Alfonso Reyes re-creates the confrontation between two societies. He laments the loss of the indigenous poetry of the Indians, saying that reconstructions contain only suggestions of what that poetry must have been, for even altered and indirect in the surviving versions it exhibits a degree of sensibility not characteristic of the translating Spanish missionaries. One poem, “Ninoyolonotza,” is quoted as an example of man’s search through the world of the senses for a concept of the ideal. Another, paraphrased in part from the Quetzalcóatl cycle, contains echoes of an ancient fertility myth and promises a rebirth that, if fulfilled, might have destroyed the blood-drinking gods of the Aztecs and so altered the somber history of Anáhuac. Discussion can do no more than suggest the magnificence of the writing in Vision of Anáhuac. All of preconquest Mexico is seen here, evoked out of a vast and prodigal storehouse of history and legend, every detail viewed through the eyes of a poet conferring impressions. The unique style is in keeping with the theme: language rises from the page to the slow swing of its rhythms, setting the standard for a new kind of poetry.

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Sometimes an effluence rises, made of nothing, from the ground. Suddenly, hiddenly, a cedar sighs its scent. We who are a secret’s tenuous dissolution, our soul no sooner yields than dream wells over. —from “Scarcely . . .” (trans. Samuel Beckett)

essays, memoirs, plays, novels, short stories, prefaces, newspaper articles, nonliterary works, and translations. A constant element of his work, as much in his prose as in his verse, is a lyricism that gives to his books a tone that is agreeable and gracious, ingenious and subtle. In his poetry are evident the influences of Luis de Góngora and Stéphane Mallarmé, combined with a personal taste for the picturesque and colloquial. In his preferred medium, the essay, he treats a great variety of subjects. His best literary criticism is to be found in the essays of La experiencia literaria, in which he pours forth his own experiences in the profession of a writer, and in “Sobre la estetica de Gongora,” with which he opens the doors to the modern study and understanding of that baroque Spanish poet. Important among his strictly literary works is Vision of Anáhuac, a poetic evocation of pre-Columbian Mexican history. Among the humanistic studies, Discurso por Virgilio (address in behalf of Vergil), contains both profound classical and American flavor; among the works with fantastic and dreamlike themes is Árbol de pólvora (tree of powder). With a profound understanding of the function of a writer, Reyes produced his greatest critical work, El deslinde (the boundary line). In it, he analyzes the artistic import of expression, style, aesthetic problems, semantics, philology, and the philosophy of language. “American, European, universal”—thus Federico de Onís described Reyes. These epithets are well applied if one consid556

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ers that this Mexican writer, through his native sensibility, his classic form, and the universality of his subjects, is, as the same critic avers, “the most successful example of a citizen of the international world of letters, both ancient and modern.” — Emil Volek

Learn More Aponte, Barbara Bockus. Alfonso Reyes and Spain: His Dialogue with Unamuno, Valle-Inclán, Ortega y Gasset, Jiménez, and Gómez de la Serna. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972. The author explores the dialogues that Reyes maintained with Spanish literary contemporaries. Their correspondence sheds light upon the lives and works of these writers. Reyes relied upon this form of communication to maintain friendships and share ideas. As a member of the Mexican intellectual elite, Reyes recognized that his Spanish contacts were vital to his literary development. Carter, Sheila. The Literary Experience. Mona, Jamaica: Savacou, 1985. A critical analysis of El deslinde, with bibliographic references. Conn, Robert T. The Politics of Philology: Alfonso Reyes and the Invention of the Latin American Literary Tradition. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2002. Conn explains how Reyes’s work helped establish the role of the writer as public intellectual in Latin America. He also examines how Reyes helped forge a sense of unity among the Latin American writers of his generation. Robb, James W. “Alfonso Reyes.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé. Vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. A thorough article from the Scribner writers series. _______. Patterns of Image and Structure. New York: AMS Press, 1969. Critical analysis of the essays of Alfonso Reyes. Shreve, Jack, and Carole A. Champagne. “Alfonso Reyes.” In Critical Survey of Poetry, edited by Philip K. Jason. 2d rev. ed. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2003. A thorough overview of Reyes’s life and career, emphasizing his poetry. 557

Alberto Ríos Mexican American poet and short-story writer Born: Nogales, Arizona; September 18, 1952 poetry: Elk Heads on the Wall, 1979; Whispering to Fool the Wind, 1982; Five Indiscretions, 1985; The Lime Orchard Woman, 1988; The Warrington Poems, 1989; Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses, 1990; The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, 2002. short fiction: The Iguana Killer: Twelve Stories of the Heart, 1984; Pig Cookies, and Other Stories, 1995; The Curtain of Trees: Stories, 1999. nonfiction: Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir, 1999.

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oth in fact and in spirit, Alberto Ríos (al-BEHR-toh REEohs) is a native of the Southwest. He was born to a Mexican father, Alberto Alvaro Ríos, a justice of the peace, and an English mother, Agnes Fogg Ríos, a nurse. Early in his life he was nicknamed Tito, a diminutive of Albertito, that is, “Little Albert.” The nickname referred to his small physical frame and differentiated him from his father. In 1975 the future author earned a bachelor of arts degree, with a major in psychology, from the University of Arizona. He then entered the university’s law school, only to find that poetry rather than the law was to be his calling. After one year of legal training he switched to the graduate program in creative writing, taking a master of fine arts degree in 1979. He joined the faculty of Arizona State University in 1982 and became Regents’ Professor of English there in 1994. He maintains an active schedule of writing, teaching, readings, and lecturing. Ríos grew up on the Mexican American border, and the work that first brought him widespread attention, Whispering to Fool the Wind, addressed most of all the splay of his roots. This volume won for Ríos the prestigious Walt Whitman Award from the Na-

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tional Academy of American Poets in 1981. His first collection of short fiction, The Iguana Killer, winner of the Western States Book Award for fiction some two years later, dealt with similar concerns. Taken together, these works identified Ríos as a firstgeneration American artist chronicling an ethnic experience that had too long gone unexplored in American letters. After their publication, Ríos was warmly praised and widely anthologized, often embraced for this subject matter. Ríos’s work extended beyond the provincial with the publication of the collection of poems Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses and his second short-fiction collection, Pig Cookies, and Other Stories. These works still spoke of a culture in transition, but they also displayed an evolving artistic vision, one having as much to do with the human condition as it has to do with an ethnic experience per se. Ríos’s writing began to manifest something beyond the tangible. A man spits on the pavement in order to rid himself of an intolerable thought. A priest’s soul leaves his body, with animal-like instinct. A fat man’s body is proof of a weight within him having nothing to do with scales or the flesh. A number of critics noted Ríos’s ability to make the commonplace seem strange—as well as his capacity to make the familiar seem magical—and aligned him in this regard with the Latin Magical Realists, such as Gabriel García Márquez.

And everything I expect has been taken away, like that, quick: The names are not alphabetized. They are in the order of dying, An alphabet of—somewhere—screaming. I start to walk out. I almost leave But stop to look up names of friends, My own name. There is somebody Severiano Ríos. —from “The Vietnam Wall”

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Ríos’s vision is important in its own right, however. In an early short story, “The Birthday of Mrs. Pineda,” a character brings a cup of coffee to his face only to discover the aroma pulling his head toward the lip of the cup. A short story published a decade later brings this conceit to fruition. “The Great Gardens of Lamberto Diaz” begins with these words: A person did not come to these gardens . . . to admire them or simply to breathe them in. No. One was breathed in by them, and something more. In this place a person was drawn up as if to the breast of the gardens, as if one were a child again, and being drawn up was all that mattered and meant everything.

Often in his interviews Ríos speaks of “situational physics,” of “emotional science.” Readers are asked in reading Ríos not simply to revise their suppositions about natural law but to relocate themselves, to reconsider their relationship to all that is tangible. People must reconfirm their presence on the planet, and then reconfirm this presence to one another; the process must begin by listening to language. Ríos is bilingual, and from the beginning he has called on the idioms and syntax of both English and Spanish in his work. He has also concerned himself with what he calls “a third language,” a language that our bodies speak to one another with or without our conscious knowledge—the wink, the nod, the small and still smaller gesture. The reader encounters this type of language even in such early poems as “Nani,” in which a small boy speaks English, his grandmother, only Spanish. She serves him lunch each week, and the old woman and the boy discover a shared understanding, bringing them closer than words ever could. Ríos has placed increasing importance on such means of bridging the gulfs that divide people. In the title poem of Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses, aged Teodoro Luna and his equally aged wife know an intimacy that the young are denied—a glance from one to the other, an eyebrow raised that turns a public event into a private experience between them. Kissing is the single act that most occupies Ríos’s attention. It illustrates 560

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“The Purpose of Altar Boys” In “The Purpose of Altar Boys” the adult Alberto Ríos assumes the voice of a mischievous altar boy who “knew about . . . things.” For example, when he assisted the priest at Communion on Sundays, he believed he had his own mission. On some Sundays, he says, his mission was to remind people of the night before. Holding the metal plate beneath a communicant’s chin, he would drag his feet on the carpet, stirring up static electricity. He would wait for the right moment, then touch the plate to the person’s chin, delivering his “Holy Electric Shock” of retribution. The sense of ease and speed in the poem’s narration is facilitated by the poet’s use of a relatively short poetic line, usually containing six or seven syllables. Although the lines are short, the sentences are long. The combination of short lines and long sentences creates a sense not only of speed but also of breathlessness—these features express the altar boy’s excitement as he tells his story of good and evil, judgment and temptation. His excitement is also conveyed by repetition. For example, the boy’s repeated use of the pronoun “I” reflects his self-assertion and reveals the pride he takes in fulfilling his mission. The altar boy is a comic character, a prankster whose mischief is essentially harmless. What is harmless in a child, however, may be evil in an adult. A voyeur is not an attractive person. Far worse are people who commit murder and claim that God told them to do it. The altar boy is merely flirting with the sin of pride when he takes upon himself the authority to judge and punish others. Thus, it is important that the poem is written in the past tense. The adult narrator has experience that he lacked as a boy, and his concepts of good and evil are no longer naïve. — James Green

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both the enormity of human desire and the inability of people to express themselves in commensurate proportions. It stands for all that divides people and all that might bring them together. Ríos is often at his best when he is exploring how people turn public events into private experience and what they must dare in order to show themselves to the world. Certainly this is the case in several of the stories in Pig Cookies. Lazaro, the small boy in the title story, is so consumed with love for a neighbor girl that his very being is shaken, his baker’s hands overcome. To put this love of her into words is a much different matter, as the story’s ending reminds us: “The most difficult act in the world, he thought with his stomach, was this first saying of hello. This first daring to call, without permission, Desire by its first name.” In 1999 Ríos published a memoir, Capirotada, named for a Mexican bread pudding made, as Ríos notes, from “a mysterious mixture of prunes, peanuts, white bread, raisins, quesadilla cheese, butter, cinnamon and cloves . . . and things people will not tell you,” like his life; it won the Latino Literary Hall of Fame Award. In 2002 he published The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, in which poems honed from fable, parable, and family legend use the “intense and supple imagination of childhood to find and preserve history beyond facts”; this collection was a finalist for the National Book Award. In addition to winning these honors, Ríos is the recipient of the Arizona Governor’s Arts Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Walt Whitman Award, the Western States Book Award for Fiction, and six Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and fiction. In 2002, he won the Western Literature Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award, the group’s highest distinction for authors whose work has defined and influenced the literature and study of the West. — Jay Boyer Learn More Logue, Mary. Review of Whispering to Fool the Wind, by Alberto Ríos. Village Voice Literary Supplement, October, 1982. This extended review was among the first to explore Ríos’s talents and is still the best. 562

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Ríos, Alberto. Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Ríos recalls his experiences growing up in Nogales, an Arizona border town. He has drawn upon these experiences to write some of his short stories. _______. “Words Like the Wind: An Interview with Alberto Ríos.” Interview by William Barillas. Américas Review 24 (Fall/ Winter, 1996). An insightful interview with Ríos. Ullman, L. “Solitaries and Storytellers, Magicians, and Pagans: Five Poets in the World.” Kenyon Review 13 (Spring, 1991). Reviews Ríos’s Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses. Wild, Peter. Alberto Ríos. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1998. Part of the Western Writers series. A brief introduction to the author’s work.

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Tomás Rivera Mexican American novelist Born: Crystal City, Texas; December 22, 1935 Died: Fontana, California; May 16, 1984 long fiction: . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra/. . . and the earth did not part, 1971 (also as This Migrant Earth, 1985; . . . and the earth did not devour him, 1987). short fiction: The Harvest: Short Stories, 1989 (bilingual). poetry: Always, and Other Poems, 1973; The Searchers: Collected Poetry, 1990. miscellaneous: Tomás Rivera: The Complete Works, 1991.

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arely has a literary reputation been so securely based on one slim novel as that of Tomás Rivera (toh-MAHS rihVAYR-ah). Though he was also highly regarded as a college administrator and educator—becoming, in 1979, the first Chicano to be named a chancellor in the University of California system—and though he published a small collection of poems (Always, and Other Poems) in 1973 and scattered poems, essays, and short stories afterward, it is on his striking episodic novel, . . . and the earth did not part, that his literary reputation rests. Born on December 22, 1935, the son of migrant workers Florencio and Josefa Hernández Rivera, Tomás Rivera himself did migrant work until 1957. He received a bachelor’s degree in education in 1958 and a master’s degree in educational administration in 1964 from Southwest Texas State University; he subsequently studied at the University of Oklahoma, from which he earned a doctorate in Romance languages and literature in 1969. His novel . . . and the earth did not part was first published in 1971, in an edition that printed both the original Spanish and its translation into English; it won the Quinto Sol National Chicano Literary Award. In 1978 he married Concepción Garza, and in 1979 he became chancellor of the University of California at Riverside. 564

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There’s nothing I can do now. But I can’t tell the others ’cause they’ll sin like me. I better not go to communion. Better that I don’t go to confession. I can’t, now that I know, I can’t. But what will Mom and Dad say if I don’t go to communion? And my godfather, I can’t leave him there waiting. I have to confess what I saw. —from “First Communion” (trans. Evangelina Vigil-Piñón)

Not a conventional novel, . . . and the earth did not part may appear to some at first reading to be a collection of loosely connected short stories and sketches. While the separate chapters are written and can be read as individual stories, critics agree that the deeper structure of the work as a whole demands that it be read as a novel. The book begins with a chapter entitled “The Lost Year,” which introduces the theme of lost time that will continue through the novel. When the narrator describes a recurring dream in which the unnamed protagonist “would suddenly awaken and then realize that he was really asleep,” the reader may be put in mind of the beginning of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931, 1981), in which the narrator wakes with the candle extinguished and cannot remember whether he has slept. As Rivera’s book continues, the reader understands that the period the narrator is describing as a year is actually several years, which have blended together into a single year. The fragmentation of the chapters that follow highlights less the memory loss of the protagonist than the slow regaining of memory he is experiencing. The novel follows the effects of migrant living and working not only on the main character but also on the community of workers. Typically, the chapters alternate sections of tersely de565

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. . . and the earth did not part Rivera’s . . . and the earth did not part (1971) has exerted a great influence on Chicano literature. The book explores the psychological and external circumstances of a boy who is coming of age in a Mexican American migrant family. The novel is a collection of disjointed narratives, including twelve stories and thirteen vignettes, told with various voices. This unusual structure evokes impressions of a lifestyle in which the continuity of existence is repeatedly broken by forced migration and in which poverty creates a deadening sameness that erases time. The story begins with “The Lost Year,” which indicates the boy has lost touch with his identity and with the reality of events. Several sections portray the dismal, oppressed condition of migrant farmworkers. In “A Silvery Night,” the boy first calls the Devil, then decides that the Devil does not exist. Religious awakening continues in the title chapter, in which the boy curses God and is not punished—the earth remains solid. The nature of sin, the mystery of sex, and the injustices and tragedies visited upon his people are all confusing to the boy. Brief moments of beauty are eclipsed by injuries and horrible deaths. A mother struggles to buy a few Christmas presents for her children. In a swindle, a family loses their only photograph of a son killed in the Korean War. The boy becomes a man, hiding under his house. The final scene offers a glimmer of hope, as he climbs a tree and imagines that someone in another tree can see him. The simple language and humble settings make the book accessible, but the novel’s unique structure and symbolism present challenges to the reader. The book has been reprinted several times, and a retelling in English (This Migrant Earth, 1985) was published by Rolando Hinojosa. A film version, And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him, was released in 1994. — Laura L. Klure

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scribed action with equally terse dialogue between unnamed speakers—sometimes between the characters of the story being told and sometimes between two people who are discussing this story, which might be well known to both of them. At the end of “The Children Couldn’t Wait,” a story about a child being shot for taking a drink of water, two people talk about how the boss who shot him went crazy and lost all of his money. Similarly, both “The Little Burn Victims” and “The Night the Lights Went Out”—the first a story of children burned to death and the second a story of a jealous lover who electrocutes himself— end with the voices of people casually discussing these tragedies. Not only do the tragedies belong to the entire community, but they are accepted almost as everyday, if fascinating, occurrences. Side by side with these apocalyptic stories are the stories that seem to center on the main protagonist himself; though it is not certain that the young boy who appears in many of these stories is the same one, it is certain that the stories are presented as if they might be about the same person. Just as the tragedies belong not only to the people to whom they happen but also to the entire community, each story about the growth and disappointments of a young boy belongs not only to the boy himself but also to people like him. In “It’s That It Hurts” the boy, having been expelled from school for fighting back when attacked by a couple of what the principal calls “our kids,” and unable to imagine breaking the news to his parents, tries to convince himself that maybe he was not expelled. The irony is that his expulsion from school marks the beginning of his real education. Three stories, “A Silvery Night,” “. . . and the earth did not part,” and “First Communion,” trace his growing mistrust of religion as he calls on the Devil to appear, curses God for letting his father and little brother both get sunstroke, and lies to a priest at confession. In each case he expects some sort of retribution to occur, but instead he comes to the sudden recognition that the Devil will not appear and that the earth will not open up and swallow him. His astonishment at learning that apocalypses need not occur leads up to the “The Portrait,” in which a man who has been 567

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swindled by a person who promised to make a portrait of his dead son searches out the swindler and forces him to make the portrait from memory. For the first time in the book, forceful action taken by a Chicano against an exploiter produces a desirable result. In the penultimate chapter, “When We Arrive,” migrant workers on a truck that has broken down discuss what they will do when they arrive, even after one of them says, “We never arrive.” They never arrive at anything except waiting for the next job, the next arrival; still, in this constant waiting, a community is forged. Before his death, Rivera was working on a second novel, La casa grande, sections of which had appeared in various journals, but no final product was released. Regardless, on the basis of his one short novel . . . and the earth did not part, which has become a standard text in North American Hispanic and Chicano literature classes, his literary reputation is secure. Partly because his novel was written in Spanish and was translated into English, many critics of Chicano literature view it as a text that liberated other Chicano writers to find their authentic voices. When the journal Revista Chicano-Riqueña, which Rivera helped to found, published a special double issue, International Studies in Honor of Tomás Rivera, after his death, many of the contributors recalled not only his presence as a writer but also his generosity as an educator and friend. — Thomas J. Cassidy Learn More Castañeda-Shular, Antonia, Tomás Ybarra-Frautos, and Joseph Sommers, eds. Chicano Literature: Text and Context. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972. A rich source of information on Mexican American life, history, criticism, and literature, with Rivera’s place in the Chicano literary canon clearly delineated. Kanellos, Nicolás, ed. Short Fiction by Hispanic Writers of the United States. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1993. Calling Rivera “one of the most beloved figures in Chicano literature,” Kanellos offers an overview of Rivera’s academic career, and an introduction to . . . and the earth did not part. 568

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_______. “Tomás Rivera.” The Hispanic Literary Companion. Detroit: Visible Ink, 1996. Includes quotes from other criticism of Rivera’s work and a list of his writings. Kanellos further discusses Rivera’s deep devotion to Chicano education and belief in the ability of literature to enlighten and inform. Lattin, Vernon E., Rolando Hinojosa, and Gary D. Keller, eds. Tomás Rivera, 1935-1984: The Man and His Work. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Review/Press, 1988. A collection of overview articles. Martinez, Manuel Luis. Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Compares the works of Kerouac and other Beat writers with works by Chicano authors. Martinez concludes that the migrant writers, Rivera and Ernesto Galarza, expressed a distinctly radical and inclusive vision of democracy in their work. Olivares, Julían, ed. International Studies in Honor of Tomás Rivera. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1986. A reprint of the double issue of Revista Chicano-Riqueña devoted to Rivera. An excellent source of information on Rivera and his work; it contains reminiscences of the man, a poem by Evangelina Vigil-Piñon written in his memory, close examinations of his work, and essays on Chicano and Hispanic literature. Saldívar, Ramón. “Tomás Rivera.” In Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1994. A compact biography covering Rivera’s life and work, and his literary influences. There is a useful long essay, balancing between historical and literary details, which provides a broad background from 1945 through the 1980’s.

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Augusto Roa Bastos Paraguayan novelist and short-story writer Born: Asunción, Paraguay; June 13, 1917 Died: Asunción, Paraguay; April 26, 2005 Also known as: Augusto Antonio Roa Bastos long fiction: Hijo de hombre, 1960 (Son of Man, 1965); Yo, el Supremo, 1974 (I the Supreme, 1986); Vigilia del almirante, 1992; El fiscal, 1993; Contravida, 1994; Madama Sui, 1995. short fiction: El trueno entre las hojas, 1953; El baldío, 1966; Madera quemada, 1967; Los pies sobre el agua, 1967; Moriencia, 1969; Cuerpo presente, y otros textos, 1972; Antología personal, 1980; Contar un cuento, y otros relatos, 1984; Cuentos completos, 2000. screenplays: Hijo de hombre, 1960 (adaptation of his novel); Shunko, 1961; Alias Gardelito, 1962; Castigo al traidor, 1966; Don Segundo Sombra, 1969 (adaptation of Ricardo Guiraldes’ novel). poetry: El ruiseñor de la aurora, y otros poemas, 1942; El naranjal ardiente: Nocturno paraguayo, 1947-1949, 1960; Poesías reunidas, 1995. nonfiction: El tiranosaurio del Paraguay da sus últimas boqueadas, 1986; Carta abierta a mi pueblo, 1986. children’s literature: El pollito de fuego, 1974; Carolina y Gaspar, 1979. miscellaneous: Metáforismos, 1996.

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ugusto Roa Bastos (ow-GOOS-toh ROH-ah BAHS-tohs) is undoubtedly the most prominent figure in modern Paraguayan literature and one of the leading novelists of Latin America. He spent his childhood in Iturbe, a small village in the Guaitá region, where he learned both Spanish and Guaraní, which is the dominant language of the country. Thus, he was exposed to a particular form of rural bilingualism as a child, which provided one of his most distinguishing traits as a writer. 570

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During his formative years Roa Bastos was sent to the capital city of Asunción to receive formal education at the Colegio de los Padres de San José. While living there and under the tutelage of his maternal uncle Hermenegildo Roa, who later became bishop of Asunción, Roa Bastos read the universal classics—Homer, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes—and the principal French thinkers of the Enlightenment—Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseu, and Voltaire. When he was fifteen years old, he joined the national army and participated in the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia (1932-1935), a conflict which became a major subject of his novel Son of Man. When the war was finally won by Paraguay, Roa Bastos returned to civilian life to work as a bank employee. He began his literary career with a never-published novel, Fulgencio Miranda, which received the Ateneo Paraguayo Prize in 1937. In the next decade he wrote El niño del rocío and Mientras llega el día, two unpublished plays that were presented by the Elenco del Ateneo Paraguayo in Asunción. For years he was a contributor and a staff member of the Paraguayan newspaper El País. Thanks to a British Council Fellowship, Roa Bastos spent time in England studying journalism. This trip gave him the opportunity to witness the devastation suffered by Europe during World War II. He also visited the North of Africa, Germany, Sweden, and while in France he interviewed General Charles De Gaulle.

Striped, swallowed up by darkness; they had no face. Nothing more than their vaguely human silhouettes, both bodies reabsorbed in their own shadows. Alike and so different nonetheless. One inert, traveling the earth’s surface with the passivity of innocence or the most absolute indifference. The other bent over, panting from the effort of dragging him through the brush and refuse. —from “The Vacant Lot” 571

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Son of Man Son of Man (1960) is a novel of “man crucified by his fellow man.” The plot includes nine stories not in chronological order; each appears at first to be independent of the others. The novel jumps from one time to another to introduce an important event or to present a character, acquiring its unity from the repetition of certain symbols and events, and from the voice of Miguel Vera, who is the protagonist-narrator in five of the stories and the omniscient spectator-narrator in the other four. Central to Son of Man is the juxtaposition of two main characters, Vera and Cristóbal Jara, or Kiritó. Vera represents the intellectual who cannot completely become one with the oppressed. Vera is aware of the need for social revolution in Paraguay, yet is too introverted and sentimental to contribute to that revolution. He simply observes the tragedy from the sidelines, unwittingly becoming a Judas figure. He denounces his comrades, he shoots Kiritó, and, by becoming mayor, he even becomes an official member of the oppressors. Kiritó is a silent, uneducated man, the antithesis of Vera. He leads his people by the force of his character, symbolizing the potential for the salvation of mankind by man himself. Kiritó sacrifices himself for his fellow men, and he is fully conscious that this is his mission: “For now the only thing that mattered was to go on, always at all costs. . . . That was his destiny.” The main theme in the novel is the desire for the social redemption of a country. Like many writers, Roa Bastos sees the Christ figure as a powerful symbol of man’s redemption by man himself. Hence, the figure of the “son of man” appears throughout the book as an outstanding individual who reveals himself in death. His death may not reduce the people’s oppression, but it supports them by reinforcing their belief in brotherhood. — Mercedes Jimenez Gonzalez

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Back in his own country, he was appointed Paraguayan cultural attaché in Buenos Aires, but the civil war, which resulted in the long-lasting dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989), forced him to remain in exile beginning in 1947. His literary activity before this moment, which includes most of his poetic attempts and several lost pieces of writing, corresponds unquestionably to a period of apprenticeship. As Roa Bastos himself has recognized, the exile experience was very significant in helping him to develop a committed stance against political violence and Paraguay’s appalling historical record with regard to human rights. Roa Bastos attempted several times to visit his home country, and in 1982 he was accused of trying to promote civil disobedience among youths. As a result, authorities revoked his passport; only after the overthrow of General Stroessner did he recover his citizenship. In 1959 his novel Son of Man won first prize in an international literary contest organized by Editorial Losada of Buenos Aires. Soon after, he was asked to prepare a screenplay from the novel, and the resulting film won its own prize from the Argentine Institute of Cinematography, thus allowing for a widespread recognition of this Paraguayan writer. In 1961 he was invited by the German Federation of Writers and the Ibero-American Institute of Berlin to participate in a seminar along with writers such as the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, the Colombian Germán Arciniegas, and the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias. During the 1960’s Roa Bastos wrote scripts for the Argentine film industry and published several collections of his short stories, some of them including already published pieces and adding a few new ones. After holding a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for creative writers in 1971, Roa Bastos reached the peak of fame with his 1974 novel I the Supreme. The novel, based on the life of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, dictator of Paraguay between 1814 and 1840, explores the complex relationships between fiction and history. Although Roa Bastos has been considered a Modernist writer of the Boom generation, this novel has many characteristics attributed to postmodern narrative such as the use of parody, the carnivalization of historical 573

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discourse, and the questioning of the concept of narrative authority. These post-Boom concerns influenced the writing of the younger generation of Latin American novelists which includes Mempo Giardinelli, Isabel Allende, and Luisa Valenzuela. After ten years of working as a professor of Guaraní and Latin American literature at the University of Toulouse in France, Roa Bastos retired in 1985. In 1989 he was awarded the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the highest recognition that a Spanish-speaking writer can receive. — Daniel Altamiranda Learn More Balderston, Daniel. “The Making of a Precursor: Carlyle in Yo, el Supremo.” Symposium 44 (Fall, 1990): 155-164. Discusses the influence of Thomas Carlyle’s 1843 essay on Doctor Francia on Roa Bastos’s novel. Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 493/494 (July/August, 1991). Special issue devoted to Roa Bastos’s work. Contains a very detailed biobibliography by José L. Roca Martinez and Virgilia Gil Amante. In Spanish. Escritura 15, no. 30 (1990). Special issue devoted to Roa Bastos’s work. In Spanish. Foster, David William. Augusto Roa Bastos. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Offers a structuralist overview of Roa Bastos’s literary production, interpretive readings of his major writings, and a useful chronology. _______. The Myth of Paraguay in the Fiction of Augusto Roa Bastos. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969. Considers El trueno entre las hojas as a tentative program of artistic experimentation, in the way the author sought to create a prophetic vision of humankind which becomes the basis of his Son of Man. Weldt-Basson, Helene Carol. Augusto Roa Bastos’s “I, the Supreme”: A Dialogic Perspective. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. Studies the use of narrative voice, symbolism, history, and intertextuality in the novel and makes a strong case for considering this a key text in Latin American postmodern writing. 574

Abraham Rodriguez, Jr. Puerto Rican novelist and short-story writer Born: Bronx, New York; 1961 long fiction: Spidertown, 1993; The Buddha Book, 2001. short fiction: The Boy Without a Flag: Tales of the South Bronx, 1992.

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braham Rodriguez (AY-brah-ham roh-DREE-gehs), Jr., is a contemporary Puerto Rican writer. Having been raised in the Bronx, he writes stories that depict the experiences of “Nuyoricans.” The concept of Nuyorican varies from generation to generation; Puerto Ricans living in New York during the 1950’s experienced life in that city differently than do members of today’s Nuyorican population. However, the struggle of Puerto Ricans, whether on the island of Puerto Rico or on the American mainland, continues to involve issues of culture and identity not easily revealed in the literature of social sciences,

Her mother was always asking her if she’d had any Lotto dreams, especially this week, with the fiftymillion dollar pot in the balance. Dalia would run through her dream bit by bit while her mother whipped some eggs into froth. “You said there were how many men with beards?” she’d ask, deriving a number from inane symbols. Her mother believed in the power of dreams. She believed God was going to disclose to her winning numbers. —from “The Lotto”

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fiction, or elsewhere. The issues are generally complex, and work that tells the stories of the Puerto Ricans living in New York is of value both to the community in New York and to the communities of Puerto Rican people on Puerto Rico and throughout the mainland. Colonization of Borinquén (Puerto Rico’s indigenous name) resulted in cultural conflicts for those whose parents migrated to New York in several waves. Puerto Ricans, although citizens of the United States, find their identities in terms of culture, race, and class re-categorized by the establishment in the United States. These categories often conflict with their family and traditional beliefs—hence the conflicts and problems with their sense of self-identification and how to express their identification to two countries. Rodriguez gives voice to that experience. In The Boy Without a Flag, Rodriguez retells the stories he has heard from his father about American imperialism, specifically the conquest of Puerto Rico in 1898. Conscious of this history, the narrator refuses to salute the American flag. In other stories, Rodriguez depicts violence and poverty in barrio life. He uses the language of the streets and the rhythms of the island from which his family comes. Drugs, promiscuity, and other social issues are addressed in his other works. They reveal the intimate knowledge of a man born and raised in New York’s South Bronx. This area is home to people from various ethnic groups, where they live often in poverty but never in a culturally poor environment. Salsa, guns, and early death are all part of Rodriguez’s milieu, and his writing evokes passion underlying the story lines. In the novel Spidertown, Rodriguez portrays the life of a young man, Miguel, who works as a drug runner for his friend and “mentor,” Spider. He seems satisfied with the world he lives in until he becomes involved with a beautiful, practical-minded young woman. He then sees the lack of substance to his life and realizes he must make some choices. Comments about this work praise Rodriguez’s use of language, the pacing of the story, and the realism of the lives portrayed. It is a portrait of poor, urban Puerto Rican lives. 577


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The Boy Without a Flag The Boy Without a Flag: Tales of the South Bronx (1992) is the first book of fiction from Abraham Rodriguez, Jr., a young Puerto Rican American whose greatest strength is his ability to capture the salsa-driven rhythms and latenight bodega rap sessions of a streetcorner posse in a raw prose style. These stories, Rodriguez declared, are “about the rancid underbelly of the American Dream. These are the kids no one likes to talk about. I want to show them as they are, not as society wishes them to be.” The narrator of “The Boy Without a Flag” is a precocious eleven-year-old schoolboy who refuses to stand up to salute the American flag during a school assembly, an act of defiance that, he hopes, will impress his father, a frustrated poet and Puerto Rican nationalist. As it turns out, though, the plan backfires, and the boy’s father, when summoned to the school, is nothing but meekly apologetic and self-critical for his son’s “crazy” behavior. The boy must come to terms with his father’s betrayal, which triggers a preadolescent passage into disillusion. Later, though, he realizes that his father has, in fact, provided him with a valuable lesson. He has learned that he must break away from his father’s sphere of influence and must find his own means of independence. The narrator works his way up from this epiphany, and it is clear that he has pledged allegiance to no one but himself, “away from the bondage of obedience.” The successes of this book—Rodriguez’s portrayal of the South Bronx, a place that inhabits his characters, brought to life with an affection, a sympathy that is in no way sentimental—cancel out its scattering of stylistic shortcomings. Rodriguez’s depictions of lost childhoods are true and brutal, and he is a writer driven by the impulse to tell the stories belonging to those who are voiceless. Their stories deserve to be heard. — Peter Markus

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In 1993 Rodriguez earned The New York Times Notable Book of the Year award for The Boy Without a Flag. He also won the 1995 American Book Award for Spidertown, which was also published in British, Dutch, German, and Spanish editions. In conjunction with Scan/LaGuardia and the National Book Foundation’s donation of copies of The Boy Without a Flag, Rodriguez conducted a workshop for youths and others at Scan/LaGuardia Memorial House in East Harlem, New York, in the spring of 2001. His works have appeared in anthologies and literary magazines including Boricuas, Growing up Puerto Rican, Story, Best Stories from New Writers, The Chattahoochee Review, and Alternative Fiction and Poetry. Rodriguez received a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2000, and he served as a literary panel member on the New York State Council of the Arts. His involvement with both the literary foundation and the Scan/LaGuardia Memorial House demonstrates his commitment to his community and to his art. In 2001, he wrote the narration for a film called Chenrezi Vision and started an East Coast small press named Art Bridge. — Louise Rodríguez Connal Learn More Flores, Juan. From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and the Latino Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Flores investigates the historical experience of Puerto Ricans in New York. Includes a discussion of Nuyorican literature. Hernandez, Carmen Dolores. Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997. This book of fourteen interviews includes a lengthy one with Rodriguez.

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Richard Rodriguez Mexican American essayist Born: San Francisco, California; July 31, 1944 nonfiction: Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, 1982; Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, 1992; Brown: The Last Discovery of America, 2002.

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ith the publication of his autobiography, Hunger of Memory, in 1982, Richard Rodriguez (rawd-REE-gehz) rose to immediate national attention as a fine, if controversial, essayist. Born Ricardo Rodriguez in San Francisco, California, in 1944, the son of Mexican immigrants, he moved with his family to Sacramento, where they had purchased a small home. Ricardo spoke only Spanish at home with his parents and siblings. In Hunger of Memory he describes his first experience of Englishlanguage society, encountered in the Catholic elementary classroom which transformed him from Ricardo to Richard. When his parents began to speak only the “public” language of English at home, at the recommendation of his Irish nun teachers, Richard suffered a loss of intimacy with his family. He later decided that the educational process itself accounted for his separation from his parents, rather than simply “public” (English) versus “private” (Spanish) language. Rodriguez was raised Catholic and attended Catholic primary and secondary schools. He earned a B.A. from Stanford University in 1967 and an M.S. from Columbia University in 1969. He did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Warburg Institute in London. He received a Fulbright Fellowship (1972-1973) and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1976-1977). Though he was offered several university teaching positions, he declined the offers because he suspected that he was benefitting from a misplaced affirmative action. That is, he was offered such positions 580

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because as a Mexican American he was a member of an underrepresented ethnic group, while he believed that his entire education and preparation had resulted in his complete assimilation into the majority. Rodriguez became an editor at Pacific News Service, where he served for more than two decades, and a contributing editor for Harper’s, U.S. News & World Report, and the Sunday “Opinion” section of the Los Angeles Times. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, American Scholar, Time, Mother Jones, New Republic, and other publications. Rodriguez spent six years writing Hunger of Memory, sections of which first appeared in magazines. Hunger of Memory is autobiographical, but rather than presenting a chronological view of Rodriguez’s growth and development, it presents his life in essays focused on his development as related to broader issues. Having learned the public language of English and entered successfully into the linguistic and cultural discourse of the dominant culture, Rodriguez reflects on the relationship between language, family, and intimacy. Having been raised Mexican American and Catholic, he examines his Catholic faith and comments on liturgical changes to Catholic rites. Though Rodriguez was awarded funding for college and postgraduate study based on merit, assistance was also based partly on his minority status.

Like those whose lives are bound by a barrio, I was reminded by Spanish of my separateness from los otros, los gringos in power. But more intensely than for most barrio children—because I did not live in a barrio—Spanish seemed to me the language of home. (Most days it was only at home that I’d hear it.) It became the language of joyful return. —from Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez

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Having thus benefitted from affirmative action, he critiques it as a misguided approach that—because it helps people based on ethnicity or race—often helps those who are no longer disadvantaged. Affirmative action, argues Rodriguez, should focus on class rather than race. Rodriguez also criticizes bilingual education as a program that prevents more rapid assimilation of non-English speakers, consequently maintaining or even aggravating their disadvantaged status in relation to the majority culture. Furthermore, Rodriguez sees education as a transformative process that gives the individual an identity as a member of a group, an identity denied the student of a bilingual program. Hunger of Memory exploded on the literary scene when first published: The book received more attention from mainstream critics than any other single work by a Chicano author.

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Brown Hunger of Memory (1982) and Days of Obligation (1992) were the first two installments of “a trilogy on American public life and my private life” that Brown (2002) completes. Though it is doubtful that Rodriguez has identified “the last discovery of America,” as his book’s subtitle claims, in Brown he musters considerable evidence to support his thesis that brown—not the red, white, and blue of the “Stars and Stripes”—is the quintessential American color. Rodriguez believes that “America is browning” and that this process is unavoidable; increasingly, Americans are unable to clearly define where they come from, no matter how detailed their family trees may be. This process continues even—often especially—when Americans oppose it, and they may fail to see the passion of “browning” because of their individualism. Overlooking how profoundly “the ‘we’ is a precondition for saying ‘I,’” Americans underplay the very impurity that enriches

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Mexican American critics and Latin Americanists immediately responded to the polemical nature of the text. Advocates of affirmative action and bilingual education registered the betrayal that only one of their own could elicit. Like Hunger of Memory, much of Days of Obligation appeared as separate essays prior to being collected. Though many of the essays take Rodriguez’s life as a point of departure, Days of Obligation is a more distanced, less polemical narrative than his first book. Rodriguez recalls, in “Asians,” the Sacramento neighborhood of his childhood and his Chinese dentist. He examines the apparent decline of Catholicism and the rise of Protestantism among Hispanics in the United States and Latin America, referencing his own Catholicism. He details the consequences of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic on the

both the American “I” and “we,” a theme that Rodriguez calls his most important. Thus, making the identification his “mestizo boast,” Rodriguez gladly describes himself as “a queer Catholic Indian Spaniard at home in a temperate Chinese city in a fading blond state in a post-Protestant nation.” Rodriguez makes no mistake in linking the personal to the public and political. The roots of individual American identities, often oppressed and oppressing, are increasingly entangled, so much so that “righteousness should not come easily to any of us.” Rodriguez’s parents emigrated from their native Mexico to California, where Richard, the third of their four children, was born. Although American census classifications have dubbed him “Hispanic,” a category he attacks, Rodriguez sometimes underscores the complexity of American identity by contending that he is “Irish,” because of the formative influence of Irish nuns who taught him English. In its “brown” form, English becomes a language best called “American,” and it is to the multiple expressions of that tongue that Rodriguez owes much of his hard-earned optimism. — John K. Roth

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gay population of San Francisco, making no effort to avoid revealing his own homosexuality. As in Hunger of Memory, he focuses predominantly on Mexican and Mexican American culture and history, particularly in relation or contrast to the United States. In “Nothing Lasts a Hundred Years,” the closing essay, he recalls the argument he had with his father when he was fourteen and his father was fifty. His father told him that life is harder than he thinks. Nearly his father’s age, he now agrees with him, and honors him, fulfilling the obligation of the book’s title. Broader in its investigation, less personal and less specifically autobiographical than Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation nonetheless continues the discourse Rodriguez initiated in his first book and proves him to be an outstanding essayist and a major figure in Chicano literature. Brown, published in 2002, is a collection of essays on a broad variety of topics, from the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel to Broadway musicals, in which the author works to subvert the notion of race in America as a distinction between black and white and suggests the color brown as a means of understanding both America’s future and its past. The book was nominated for the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction. During the 1990’s and early 2000’s, Rodriguez was often seen on the Public Broadcasting System’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in his capacity as an essayist. His abiding theme was the reexamination of race, and identity in general, in American society. His awards include the Frankel Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities (now known as the National Humanities Medal) and the International Journalism Award from the World Affairs Council of California. In 1997 he received the coveted George Foster Peabody Award, recognizing his “outstanding achievement in broadcasting and cable.” He lives in San Francisco. — Linda Ledford-Miller Learn More Challener, Daniel D. Stories of Resilience in Childhood: The Narratives of Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez, 584

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John Edgar Wideman, and Tobias Wolff. New York: Garland, 1997. Challener examines Hunger of Memory and autobiographical works by four other authors to determine how bilingual education, family, community, ethnic discrimination, and other factors contributed to the authors’ resilience. Christopher, Renny. “Rags to Riches to Suicide: Unhappy Narratives of Upward Mobility—Martin Eden, Bread Givers, Delia’s Song, and Hunger of Memory.” College Literature 29 (Fall, 2002). Discusses upward social and class mobility and the accompanying sense of loss, and includes an excerpt from Hunger of Memory. Danahay, Martin A. “Richard Rodriguez’s Poetics of Manhood.” In Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities, edited by Peter F. Murphy. New York: New York University Press, 1994. The chapter on Rodriguez is part of a collection that looks at the “gendered” work of male authors and how they address masculinity and sexuality. Foster, David William. “Other and Difference in Richard Rodriquez’s Hunger of Memory.” In Postcolonial and Queer Theories: Intersections and Essays, edited by John C. Hawley. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Analysis of Mexican American identity, male homosexuality, and ethnic communities in Rodriguez’s book is included in this collection of essays about gay cultures that do not fit the Western paradigm. Guajardo, Paul. Chicano Controversy: Oscar Acosta and Richard Rodriguez. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Argues for looking anew at Rodriguez’s work and including him in the canon of Chicano literature. Rodriguez, Richard. “A View from the Melting Pot: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez.” Interview by Scott London. In The Writer’s Presence, edited by Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Interview with Rodriguez on race, ethnic and cultural identity, academia, affirmative action, bilingual education, class, and other subjects. Saldaña-Portillo, Josefina. “Who’s the Indian in Aztlán? Rewriting Mestizaje, Indianism, and Chicanismo from the Lacandón.” In The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, edited by Ileana 585

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Rodriguez. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. This collection of essays about the treatment of poor people in Latin American literature includes analyses of the treatment of Mexican American identity and indigenous cultures in Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation, and An Argument with My Mexican Father. Sedore, Timothy. “Violating the Boundaries: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez.” Michigan Quarterly Review 38 (Summer, 1999). Rodriguez discusses his sense of community and Chicano literature.

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José Rubén Romero Mexican novelist and poet Born: Cotija de la Paz, Michoacán, Mexico; September 25, 1890 Died: Mexico City, Mexico; July 4, 1952 long fiction: Apuntes de un lugareño, 1932 (Notes of a Villager, 1988); Desbandada, 1934; El pueblo inocente, 1934; Mi caballo, mi perro y mi rifle, 1936; La vida inútil de Pito Pérez, 1938 (The Futile Life of Pito Pérez, 1966); Una vez fui rico, 1939; Rosenda, 1946. short fiction: Cuentos rurales, 1915. poetry: Fantasías, 1908; La musa heroica, 1912; Sentimental, 1919; Tacámbaro, 1922. miscellaneous: Breve historia de mis libros, 1942.

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uring his sixty-two years José Rubén Romero (hoh-SAY rew-BAYN raw-MAY-roh) was, among other things, a poet, short-story writer, grocer, haberdasher, civil servant, revolutionary, diplomat, novelist, and essayist—more or less in that order. His lifetime (1890-1952) was for the most part a period of violent and sweeping change unparalleled in Mexican history; not

We sat down on the outside edge of the tower with our legs dangling down. My new shoes, next to Pito’s, were well polished and they shone with that foolish pride of the rich. . . . Our feet epitomized our entire social world filled with its injustices and inequalities. —from The Futile Life of Pito Pérez (trans. William O. Cord)

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The Futile Life of Pito Pérez The Futile Life of Pito Pérez (1938) takes a critical look at Mexican society of the 1920’s and 1930’s through the eyes of Pito Peréz, who tells the unnamed narrator of the various escapades he unwittingly suffers from childhood until the day of his death. As the town drunk, Pito sees himself as life’s loser, a pattern established early in his life when his mother adopted a child and ensured that he had more food, comfort, and love than her own son. By Pito’s own account, his life has been “downhill” ever since. His gentle and optimistic demeanor blinds him to the devastation which greets his every turn. That he should happen to select unworthy friends is a paltry second to his uncanny instinct for becoming love’s foil and fool. Repeatedly, he risks all to better his lovers’ lives. Without fail, his prize is to watch them marry someone deemed more socially acceptable, and with each devastation, Pito increases both his hopes for a better future and his expectation of even more cruel results. He finally strikes upon his solution to

even the war of independence from Spain (1821) was as protracted or witnessed such carnage. Although Romero did not participate in the military phase of the revolution, through the influence of his father he was named private secretary to the revolutionary governor of the state of Michoacán. Accused of political agitation, Romero fled the state capital, Morelia, for Mexico City, later settling in Tacámbaro, where he engaged in the politically safe professions of grocer and haberdasher. At the age of twenty-eight, however, literary fame and political connections brought him back to Morelia to serve the new governor, Pascual Ortíz Rubio. Once again on the move, he returned to Mexico City in 1920 as the emissary of the governor and to take a position in the diplo588

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life’s inconstancy: to betroth himself to Caneca, a female skeleton for whom he works as a street peddler. The novel ends with Pito’s death. His body, significantly, is found on a rubbish heap. In his pocket, Pito has placed his last will and testament, a bitter document which he asks his readers to accept as accurate, since he was mad and therefore able to perceive the truth. In it, he denounces most of the highly held human sentiments of liberty, equality, fraternity, humanity, friendship, and love. Instead, he extols thievery, dishonesty, greed, and ambition. Romero’s resolutely cynical view of Mexico’s infrastructure precludes any characterization based on values of trust or love. The inference that madness and death are the principled individual’s response to the hypocritical, deceitful world is borne out in Pito’s last will and testament, which is a resounding denouncement of all institutions. The pervasive irony of the work makes its social critique successful. Such a serious tone would seem to preclude a wide readership for the novel, yet since its publication Romero’s novel has maintained a vast audience as it has been “discovered” by successive generations. — John Knowles

matic service, an appointment he held until his retirement eight years before his death. The first diplomatic posting for Romero outside Mexico occurred in 1930 during the presidency of his mentor, Ortíz Rubio. While he was in Barcelona, Spain, nostalgia for his homeland inspired an autobiographical novel, Notes of a Villager, published in 1932. The title of this novel seems a foreshadowing of two characteristics that reappeared in his later fiction: a preference for anecdote at the expense of plot and the use of rural settings. By the end of the 1930’s Romero was the author of seven novels and the subject of two critical studies. Before the age of forty-two Romero wrote only rather uninspired poetry and unread short stories. The publication of Notes 589

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of a Villager signaled a change in his literary fortunes. In novel writing he at last achieved the leisurely pace and the discursive nature that best suited the shrewdly crafted, yet seemingly disorderly memories which were to become the basic ingredients of his fiction. The broad sweep of the novel also provided him with a vehicle for the portrayal of the social, political, and economic ills that preceded, survived, and transformed the revolution. The sentiments of the rural and village poor to which his novels gave voice were also present in his poetry, but not even in his best book of poems, Tacámbaro, are they expressed as clearly and as effectively as in the fiction. Like many uninspired young poets, Romero chose as his principal subject the passions of youth, a theme which he could not separate from the worn-out rhetoric of popular Romanticism. Aside from the sentimentality and general poverty of expression, the weakness of his poetry is in its 590

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predilection for the consciously literary, resonant phrase to the exclusion of the simple articulation of felt experience. A success among readers of poetry in his home state, Romero owed his popularity more to the revolutionary fervor of the times than to the quality of his verse. In his novels, however, Romero was more concerned with the forceful rendering of character and incident than with sonority. Furthermore, by the time he began to write his novels, youthful optimism and revolutionary fervor no longer seemed appropriate; it had become clear that the revolution had betrayed the ideals of his youth and of “the innocent people” who provide the title for his third novel, El pueblo inocente. Essentially a moralist in the tradition of the Spanish and Mexican picaresque, Romero was skilled at detecting hypocrisy and exposing hypocrites. In his best-known and still widely read novel The Futile Life of Pito Pérez, the protagonist is granted representative status. Endowed with the capacity of simple people to see the truth about life, Pito comes to embody the nub of Mexican experience. An expert liar and swindler, he knows the truth about the lives of his dishonest, self-deceiving victims better than they do. The sins of Pito against his victims’ property and his own purity are depicted, therefore, as a form of moral resistance or revenge against duplicity, mere innocent pleasures at the expense of those who have no use for innocence. In his final novel, Rosenda, Romero returns to the theme of innocence betrayed. This time, however, the subject of the introspection is an archetypal, self-sacrificing Mexican woman, and the meditations about Mexican life are from a female perspective. The warmth and color of The Futile Life of Pito Pérez contrast with the allegorical dryness of Romero’s earlier fiction. Pito’s joyful misanthropy and verbal play are an antidote to the cynicism that darkens the final pages in this and other works. Paradoxically, this novel proves that as long as there are false pieties and official lies, there is reason for cheer; there is reason to celebrate life as a comedy of deceit. Without liars and cheats to defraud, Romero implies, life would offer little fun. — Charles A. Piano 591

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Learn More Brushwood, John S. Mexico in Its Novel: A Nation’s Search for Identity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966. An analysis of the novel in Mexican literature, including a profile and overview of the work of José Rubén Romero. Chandler, Richard E., and Kessel Schwartz. A New History of Spanish American Fiction. Rev. ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. This survey of Spanish American fiction contains a discussion of Romero’s novels. Langford, Walter M. The Mexican Novel Comes of Age. South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971. Romero’s importance in the development of the Mexican novel is discussed. Mackegney, James Cuthbert. “Some Non-fictional Aspects of La vida inútil de Pito Pérez.” Romance Notes 6 (1964). Draws connections between the novel and history.

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Juan Ruiz de Alarcón Mexican playwright Born: Mexico City, Mexico; 1581 Died: Madrid, Spain; August 4, 1639 Also known as: Don Juan Ruiz de Alarcón y Mendoza drama: Los favores del mundo, pr. c. 1616-1618; Las paredes oyen, pr. 1617 (The Walls Have Ears, 1942); Algunas hazañas de las muchachas de don García Hurtado de Mendoza, marqués de Cañete, pb. 1622 (with Luis de Belmonte y Bermúdez, Guillén de Castro y Bellvís, Antonio Mira de Amescua, Luis Vélez de Guevara, and others); El anticristo, pr. 1623, pb. 1634; Siempre ayuda la verdad, pr. 1623, pb. 1635; La industria y la suerte, pb. 1628; El semejante a sí mismo, pb. 1628; La cueva de Salamanca, pb. 1628; Mudarse por mejorarse, pb. 1628; Todo es ventura, pb. 1628; El desdichado en fingir, pb. 1628; Parte primera de las comedias, pb. 1628; La verdad sospechosa, pb. 1630 (as El mentiroso in Lope de Vega Carpio’s Parte veynte y dos de las comedias del fénix de España Lope de Vega Carpio; The Truth Suspected, 1927); Ganar amigos, pb. 1633; El examen de maridos, pb. 1633; Los empeños de un engaño, pb. 1634; El dueño de las estrellas, pb. 1634; La amistad castigada, pb. 1634; La manganilla de Melilla, pb. 1634; El tejedor de Segovia, I, pb. 1634; El tejedor de Segovia, II, pb. 1634; La prueba de las promesas, pb. 1634; Los pechos privilegiados, pb. 1634; La crueldad por el honor, pb. 1634; Parte segunda de las comedias, pb. 1634; La culpa busca la pena, y el agravio la venganza, pb. 1646; Quien mal anda en mal acaba, pb. c. 1652; No hay mal que por bien no venga: O, Don Domingo de don Blas, pb. 1653 (Look for the Silver Lining, 1941); Comedias escogidas, pb. 1867 (3 volumes); Obras completas de Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, pb. 1957-1968 (3 volumes); Teatro, pb. 1992 (2 volumes). 593

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on Juan Ruiz de Alarcón (hwahn rew-EES thay ahl-ahrKOHN) was born in Mexico City or nearby, possibly in Taxco. His parents had emigrated from Spain, but very little is known about them beyond the fact that both bore illustrious family names. The father had some connection to the silver mines of Taxco, perhaps as an overseer, and the mother was known as Doña Leonor. The playwright’s ostentatious addition of the title “Don” later in life derives from a claim to hereditary nobility through the maternal line of Mendoza. Ruiz de Alarcón completed several courses in canon law at the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico by 1600, but apparently he did not graduate. By October of that year, he was in Spain, enrolled at the University of Salamanca. In very short order—a matter of two weeks—he received a bachelor’s degree in canon law and immediately registered to pursue the equivalent degree in civil law. Records at the University of Salamanca suggest that he initially matriculated as simply Juan Ruiz. In time, he added “de Alarcón,” and as he became more acclimatized to a new and often hostile environment, the mother’s family name was appended, which served to justify the addition of Don at the beginning. By the time his name assumed its full form, he was established in Madrid as a dramatist. At least one wit of the day

If he were reckless, restless, and inclined To pick a fight at the least provocation, Or married far below his station, If he were to die, I still would find The strength to bear these things and control My grief. But to know he’s a liar! Oh, What a horrible fault! It’s so Repugnant to my very soul. —from The Truth Can’t Be Trusted (trans. Dakin Matthews)

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made the comment that Ruiz de Alarcón’s name had by then come to exceed the bearer’s height by its inordinate length. Another commented that the somewhat questionable use of D. (the abbreviation of Don) could serve as the writer’s half portrait in profile, as he was both humpbacked and pigeonbreasted. Another observed that it was impossible to tell, seen from a distance, whether he was coming or going. It was also held against him that he had reddish hair, as, according to popular superstition, hair of that shade indicated complicity with the powers of the netherworld. Nor was it in his favor that he was a Creole, by virtue of his birth in the New World, who had come to Spain against the tide of emigration. The future playwright received a degree in civil law in 1602 and then spent three more years studying toward the equivalent of a master’s, which he did not receive, likely owing to the great expense it would have entailed. He finally did receive a licentiate degree from the University of Mexico in 1609, and during the next four years he aspired to a university chair but was unsuccessful. Meanwhile, he practiced law in various capacities. By April 24, 1614, however, he had settled again in Spain, this time in Madrid, where he would spend the remainder of his life. The legal background he possessed made Ruiz de Alarcón unique among the coterie of playwrights then active in Madrid, most of whom were or would become churchmen. His considerable training and experience in the law served to foster a predominantly secular outlook and helps to explain the proposed legal and social reforms expressed in two plays in particular, El dueño de las estrellas and La crueldad por el honor. It also helps one understand the advocacy of reason, his characteristically concise and precise style, and the pains taken everywhere in his work to offer logical explanations for behavior and to analyze actions and motivations. This intellectual formation and predisposition serve to explain many aspects that strike the casual reader as being different in his theater. The difference, one notes, has been attributed to other factors, among them the resentment he must have felt at being treated so ill by his fellow men of letters, by fortune, and by nature; his having been born and reared in Mexico; and his sup596


posed classical bent. The supposed “Mexicanness” of his production has been held for naught by at least one distinguished modern Mexican critic, Antonio Alatorre, and the other two factors fare little better when submitted to scrutiny. Finally, he was unique in that he wrote primarily to keep body and soul together while aspiring to other things, specifically to a

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The Truth Suspected The Truth Suspected (1630) presents the misadventures of a young man who elevates falsehood to a fine art. Don García’s creative imagination and verbal dexterity deceive and amaze all with whom he comes in contact. His objective, he discloses, is to become famous by whatever means necessary, and because his forte is fabrication, that will serve his purpose. It is left for the audience to decide whether Don García is a compulsive liar who thus rationalizes his defect or is in fact consciously pursuing a perverted notion of fame by attempting to excel at what he does best. It is clear, in any event, that his actions are counterproductive, as his father and his manservant frequently remind him. In the end, he is obliged to marry Lucrecia when he is in fact in love with Jacinta, partly as a result of mistaken identity earlier in the play, but mainly because he has persisted in spinning a tissue of lies. Although Don García might be said to be punished in this manner, by frustration, the resolution is patently unfair to Lucrecia. Pierre Corneille, Ruiz de Alarcón’s better-known French contemporary, realized this, and changed the ending to make it more palatable to the audience of his adaptation, Le Menteur (1644; The Liar, 1671). The ending Ruiz de Alarcón provides need not be taken to illustrate poetic justice but may be seen merely as the continuation of a venerable tradition of comedy, that of the arbitrary pairing off at the end. — James Allan Parr

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civil service post for which his legal training had equipped him. Because playwriting was only an avocation, beyond his regular work on the Council of the Indies, the professional dramatists reviled Ruiz de Alarcón, and performances of his plays were frequently interrupted by unexplained accidents on the stage. Discouraged, he did little writing during the last ten years of his life. Once he secured the civil service post, in 1626, he continued to avoid the theater, and he turned his back on it definitively when he received a promotion in 1633 that allowed for a modicum of affluence. Ignoring the good advice of an Italian acquaintance, Ruiz de Alarcón willingly exchanged “ambrosia for chocolate.” He died on August 4, 1639. — James Allan Parr Learn More Claydon, Ellen. Juan Ruiz de Alarcón: Baroque Dramatist. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970. Claydon presents a study of the life and works of Ruiz de Alarcón. Includes bibliography. Halpern, Cynthia Leone. The Political Theater of Early Seventeenth Century Spain: With Special Reference to Juan Ruiz de Alarcón. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Halpern examines the political theater that existed during the seventeenth century in Spain, focusing on Ruiz de Alarcón and his works. Includes bibliography. Parr, James A., ed. Critical Essays on the Life and Work of Juan Ruiz de Alarcón. Madrid: Editorial Dos Continentes, 1972. A collection of essays discussing the life and plays of Ruiz de Alarcón. Includes bibliography. Poesse, Walter. Juan Ruiz de Alarcón. New York: Twayne, 1972. A basic study of the life and works of the early Spanish dramatist. Includes bibliography. Whicker, Jules. The Plays of Juan Ruiz de Alarcón. Rochester, N.Y.: Tamesis, 2003. Discusses the preoccupation with deception in the plays of Ruiz de Alarcón. Whicker maintains the playwright’s concern with truth-telling in literature, and his seriousness and moral orthodoxy, can be viewed both positively and negatively. 598

Juan Rulfo Mexican novelist and short-story writer Born: Barranca de Apulco, Jalisco, Mexico; May 16, 1918 Died: Mexico City, Mexico; January 7, 1986 long fiction: Pedro Páramo, 1955, revised 1959, 1964, 1980 (English translation, 1959, 1994). short fiction: El llano en llamas, 1953, revised 1970, 1980 (The Burning Plain, and Other Stories, 1967). screenplays: El gallo de oro y otros textos para cine, 1980 (partial translation, “The Golden Cock,” 1992). nonfiction: Juan Rulfo: Autobiografía armada, 1973 (Reina Roffé, compiler); Inframundo: El México de Juan Rulfo, 1980 (Inframundo: The Mexico of Juan Rulfo, 1983). miscellaneous: Toda la obra, 1992 (critical edition); Los cuadernos de Juan Rulfo, 1994.

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uan Rulfo (hwahn REWL-foh) has been recognized as one of the greatest modern Mexican novelists, one of the forerunners of the “boom” in Latin American fiction of the 1960’s, and one of the initiators of Magical Realism. He was born to a landowner family impoverished by the Mexican Revolution. Both his parents died in his early childhood; his father and various other relatives were assassinated. The brutality of the countryside Cristeros uprising of 1926 to 1929 persisted in his memory. Rulfo was raised both in an orphanage and by relatives. He studied law in Guadalajara, but he soon moved to Mexico City to pursue his literary ambitions. He scraped a bare living working as an immigration officer, a salesman for a tire company, a movie scriptwriter and television producer, and, after 1962, as the director of the editorial department of the National Institute of Indian Affairs. As adviser to the Mexican Center of Writers, he helped to educate generations of Mexican literati. In 599

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1970 Rulfo received the National Prize for Literature; in 1980 he became a member of the Mexican Academy of Language; and in 1985 he was awarded the prestigious Cervantes Prize in Spain. Rulfo’s fame rests on two slim volumes, the collection of short stories The Burning Plain, and Other Stories and, especially, the novel Pedro Páramo, in which he distilled his stark vision of the Mexican countryside ravaged by the revolution, poverty, and violence. Páramo can be translated as “wasteland.” His photographs in Inframundo are a powerful companion to his vision of Mexican barren landscapes. Although he began to write earlier, Rulfo found his characteristic voice in the mid-1940’s when he began to craft, one by one, his masterpiece stories. Behind the deceptively simple facade of his rustic characters and their discourse stripped to “bare bones” hides a stunning virtuosity of narrative technique. Each story is narrated in a different way, yet the experiment is not showcased for the sake of experiment itself but blends with the other elements to convey the author’s bleak view of modern, revolutionary, and postrevolutionary Mexico. “Luvina,” one of his best stories, adds a magic—almost fantastic—dimension, and through myth, modern and provincial Mexico stands for the universal condition of modern humankind. Pedro Páramo appeared at a time when Mexico was consolidating its postrevolution and wartime gains and dreamed of participating, although belatedly, at the banquet of modernity. In his

Because what happened is that Natalia and I killed Tanilo Santos between the two of us. We got him to go with us to Talpa so he’d die. And he died. We knew he couldn’t stand all that traveling; but just the same, we pushed him along between us, thinking we’d finished him off forever. That’s what we did. —from Talpa (trans. George D. Schade)

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novel, Rulfo magnificently tied together the different threads from his stories and mixed them together in an anguished parable of the modern and yet ageless Mexico, violently torn between history and myth. What makes Pedro Páramo a unique achievement is its masterful blend of the stark realities evoked, in which murder, death, rape, and incest destroy life; of modern experimental techniques, which turn the apparent chaos of fleeting narrative fragments into an artistic structure executed with a clockwork precision; and of Mexican folklore and traditional culture, which put familiar faces on any absurdity. As if in homage to the Day of the Dead (celebrated in Mexico on November 2), all the characters of the novel are long dead; their “souls in pain” cannot rest in peace; the monsoon rains resuscitate them, and the skeletons begin to remember and to replay their squalid lives. Black hu601

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Pedro Páramo Pedro Páramo (1955) is one of the most important Mexican novels of the second half of the twentieth century. In episodes that recall a number of universal myths, and with Mexican characters who recall Greek heroes such as Odysseus, Telemachus, Oedipus, and Electra, Rulfo tells about people searching for identity in love, family origins, and interpersonal relationships. The novel is presented in two sections. In the first, which has no chronology, the point of view is Juan Preciado’s, who is dead when the novel begins. The second section has an omniscient narrator who gives the history of Comala from Páramo’s childhood to the moment of his death. Thus, the time of the second section is prior to that of the first one. In the first part, Juan Preciado is sent by his mother Dolores to find Pedro Páramo, the father who abandoned Juan and Dolores before Juan was born. Juan’s half-brother Abundio guides him to Comala, located “at the mouth of Hell,” where ghosts speak from the grave to describe the sinister influence of Pedro Páramo on

mor, absurdity of situations and dialogue, and an overall dreamlike character all bring the novel close to surrealism, a connection borne out in Rulfo’s later film scripts. Rulfo continued to work on the text of his novel for the next quarter of a century, sometimes augmenting, sometimes deleting. Thus in each edition, the textual sequence is broken up into different narrative fragments. In the 1980 edition, he strengthened the graphic markers and established seventy segments. With hindsight, it is relatively easy to identify the nuclear narratives; the hard part comes when the reader attempts to relate them to the historical chronology. Yet the degree to which the historical background can be reconstructed is surpris602

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the town and its inhabitants. Juan dies without discovering his identity, since he never meets his father. Páramo died years before Juan’s arrival, murdered by his son Abundio. Among the ghostly voices of Comala (in the second section) is that of Susana San Juan, Páramo’s childhood sweetheart and his life’s obsession. When young Susana left Comala in the company of her father, Bartolomé, Páramo waited thirty years for her return. When she reappeared, she was psychologically disturbed by an incestuous relationship forced upon her by Bartolomé. In her delirium, Susana confuses Bartolomé and Páramo with a third man: Florencio. Florencio is Susana’s husband, or perhaps he is a sublimation of the father figure in Susana’s mind. Susana finds happiness and fulfillment in fantasies about her relationship with Florencio, but her madness makes her inaccessible to Páramo. Like Juan, Páramo dies without finding the identity sought, in Páramo’s case, in the love of Susana San Juan. The fragments of Pedro Páramo are like the shards of a broken mirror. They reflect the characters, their relationships, and their identities. It is up to the reader to reconstruct the mirror in order to discover the truth reflected in it. — Warren L. Meinhardt

ing. What is even more interesting is that Rulfo, who had up to a point striven to establish the historical, chronological, and geographical points of reference for the story, started to demolish them with vengeance. In Pedro Páramo, realism and its conventions become but a pretext for their own subversion and parody. Readers have recognized from early on that behind the fatherson relation in the novel hides the Oedipus myth. Allegorical readings have sprung up based on everything from classical and Aztec myths to psychoanalysis. Yet the mythical layer of the novel relies more on the haunting Mexican realities than on the Greek, modern West European, or pre-Columbian myths. Pedro 603

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Páramo closes the cycle of Mexican postrevolutionary rural novel and has become a part of the Mexican national myth, one of Mexico’s founding fictions. — Emil Volek Learn More Detjens, Wilma Else. Home as Creation: The Influence of Early Childhood Experience in the Literary Creation of Gabriel García Márquez, Agustín Yáñez, and Juan Rulfo. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Detjens analyzes the relationship of childhood to the creative process in Pedro Páramo and novels by Latin American authors. Dove, Patrick. The Catastrophe of Modernity: Tragedy and the Nation in Latin American Literature. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2004. Dove analyzes Pedro Páramo and works by other authors to determine how literature reflects and comes to terms with societal catastrophe in Latin America. Jordan, Michael S. “Noise and Communication in Juan Rulfo.” Latin American Literary Review 24, no. 27 (January-June, 1996): 115-130. Excellent analysis of several short stories and Pedro Páramo, investigating the presence of noise and abundance of “speech acts” in a narrative universe in which real communication is ultimately impossible. Leal, Luis. Juan Rulfo. Boston: Twayne, 1983. The first fulllength study in English of Rulfo’s work. Relates Rulfo’s first unpublished novel, “The Son of Affliction,” to his difficult childhood. Divides his writing into the first prose work, the early stories, and the later stories, then focuses on the novel Pedro Páramo. Also includes a brief chapter on Rulfo’s screenplays and the films made from them as well as his public lectures. Includes an excellent bibliography. Mendez Rodenas, Adriana. “Narcissus in Bloom: The Desiring Subject in Modern Latin American Narrative: María Luisa Bombal and Juan Rulfo.” In Latin American Women’s Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis, edited by Anny Brooksbank Jones and Catherine Davies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Mendez Rodenas applies psychoanalytic theory and a feminist approach to compare Rulfo’s use 604

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of the Narcissus myth in Pedro Páramo with María Louisa Bombal’s use of the myth in The Shrouded Woman. Reinhardt-Childers, Ilva. “Sensuality, Brutality, and Violence in Two of Rulfo’s Stories: An Analytical Study.” Hispanic Journal 12, no. 1 (Spring, 1991): 69-73. Discusses “At Daybreak” and “The Burning Plain” from the perspective of the extreme and unpredictable violence they contain. Rulfo, Juan. Juan Rulfo’s Mexico: Essays. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. A collection of 175 of Rulfo’s photographs of Mexico. Also contains six essays analyzing Rulfo’s images, including “Forms That Defy Oblivion” by Carlos Fuentes.

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Ernesto Sábato Argentine novelist and essayist Born: Rojas, Argentina; June 24, 1911 long fiction: El túnel, 1948 (The Outsider, 1950; also known as The Tunnel); Sobre héroes y tumbas, 1961 (On Heroes and Tombs, 1981); Abaddón, el exterminador, 1974, revised 1978 (The Angel of Darkness, 1991). nonfiction: Uno y el universo, 1945; Hombres y engranajes: Reflecciones sobre el dinero, la razón y el derrumbe de nuestro tiempo, 1951; Heterodoxia, 1953; El caso Sábato, 1956; El otro rostro del peronismo, 1956; El escritor y sus fantasmas, 1963; Tango: Discusión y clave, 1963; Tres aproximaciones a la literatura de nuestro tiempo: Robbe-Grillet, Borges, Sartre, 1968; Itinerario, 1969; La convulsión politica y social de nuestro tiempo, 1969; Mitomagia: Los temos del misterio, 1969; Ernesto Sábato: Claves políticas, 1971; La cultura en la encrucijada nacional, 1973; El escritor y la crisis contemporánea, 1976 (The Writer in the Catastrophe of Our Time, 1990); Diálogos, 1976; La robotización del hombre y otras páginas de ficción y reflexion, 1981; Entre la letra y la sangre: Conversaciones con Carlos Catania, 1989; Lo mejor de Ernesto Sábato, 1989; Antes del fin, 1998; Medio siglo con Sábato: Entrevistas, 2000 (interviews); La resistencia, 2000. edited text: Cuentos que me apasionaron, 1999-2000 (2 volumes). miscellaneous: Obra completa, 1997 (2 volumes).

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rnesto Sábato (ehr-NAYS-toh SAH-bah-toh) emerged from the Argentine pampas to examine his nation’s character and to explore the existential crisis of modern humanity. He was born on June 24, 1911, in Rojas, Argentina, where his Italian immigrant parents owned the local flour mill. One of the searing events in Sábato’s life came in 1924, when his parents sent him to La Plata to attend secondary school. Torn from his commu-

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nity and large family, Sábato suffered a nervous collapse. He regained stability by immersing himself in the orderly world of mathematics and science. In 1929 he entered the Institute of Physics at the National University of La Plata, where he became involved with anarchist and communist student groups. In 1934 he attended a student communist congress in Brussels, Belgium, and once more fell into mental despondency. He fled to Paris, again finding peace by immersing himself in science. He returned to La Plata, completed his doctorate in 1937, and received a fellowship to study with French physicist Irène JoliotCurie. After his time in France, he spent a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1940 he accepted professorships in theoretical physics at schools in La Plata and Buenos Aires. Although science had provided him with needed mental stability, Sábato came to believe that humanity’s desire to rest its physical, mental, and spiritual well-being on science and reason had led to disaster. Thus, he left science by using his teaching positions to finance his literary apprenticeship, served by writing regularly for Sur and La Nación. In 1945 the dictator Juan Perón, offended by Sábato’s writing, forced him to resign his professorships, which had the effect of freeing him to devote himself fully to literature. It was the first of several times that Sábato’s staunch support of freedom of speech got him in trouble with Argentine caudillos. In 1945 Sábato published a book

A terrible anxiety began to weigh on his spirit, as though in the middle of some unknown territory night had fallen and he found he had to orient himself by tiny lights in far-off huts inhabited by people who were utter strangers to him, or by the glow of a great fire off at some unreachable distance. —from The Angel of Darkness (trans. Andrew Hurley)

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of essays, Uno y el universo (one and the universe), which earned for him national recognition. In 1948, with Albert Camus’s help, he found a publisher for his first novel, The Outsider, which gained for Sábato international recognition. Two further volumes of essays followed, and in 1955 he became editor of Mundo Argentino until his support of freedom of speech and press brought him into conflict with the military government of Pedro Aramburu. Sábato was forced to resign his position, a decision he made again in 1958, when, as director of cultural relations in the Arturo Frondizi government, he became dissatisfied with government policy. He had published further volumes of essays in the 1950’s, but it was his second novel, On Heroes and Tombs, appearing in 1961, that assured his stature in Latin American letters. On Heroes and Tombs encompassed themes that concerned Sábato throughout his literary career. The novel begins in May, 1953, when seventeen-year-old Martín meets and falls in love with the myste608

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The Outsider The Outsider (1948) has become a classic of Argentine literature and has brought international fame to Sábato’s work. In the book, Sábato develops two themes present in many of his other works: the isolation of the individual and love’s inability to provide total happiness. The main character, Juan Pablo Castel, is a painter who has been jailed for murder. He narrates the circumstances of his crime from prison, guiding the reader through the murky maze of his thoughts, and, importantly, through a series of three dreams that reveal a great deal about his character and state of mind. The novel never delves into description of the novel’s setting (Buenos Aires) or of other characters. Instead, Castel probes his memories with an artist’s eye for detail, painting a bleak portrait of the world and his place in it. Castel is utterly alienated and detached from society. He is without friends or family and, at the point at which his story begins, without a lover. When he meets María Ibarne Hunter, a woman who seems to understand his paintings, he becomes obsessed with her, and the two develop a deep, dark, and complicated relationship. Their affair, like every other aspect of Castel’s life, is scarred by the narrator’s inflexibility, his inability to communicate, and his morbid existentialism. Unsurprisingly, the relationship ends unhappily, and Castel is imprisoned for María’s murder. However, he has long since been trapped in a mental prison of his own making, and this does not change in jail: His world view continues to be colored by his unhappy solitude and his distorted, disordered, and detached vision of reality. Indeed, the Spanish title, El túnel, has also been translated as The Tunnel (1988) as well as The Outsider (1950), a clear reference to the main character’s isolation. — Anna A. Moore

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rious Alejandra. In June, 1955, she kills her father, Fernando, and then commits suicide. To explain the events of those two years, Martín and other central characters journey through 150 years of Argentine history, come into contact with the major social classes and ethnic groups of Argentina, and confront the painful events of their own lives as they try to comprehend the tragedy of Fernando and Alejandra. Few writers have described the existential crisis of modern times more powerfully and clearly than does Sábato in On Heroes and Tombs. More volumes of essays followed On Heroes and Tombs, and in 1974, Sábato published his third novel. A nervous condition restricted further literary output, but he has retained his preeminent position in the Argentine literary world. His support of freedom continued to win for him respect. After the brutal military dictatorship that lasted from 1976 to 1983, President Raúl Alfonsín appointed Sábato to head the National Commission for the Disappearance of Persons. Sábato is in the forefront of post-World War II Latin American writers. Recognition of his importance continues to grow in the United States and elsewhere. — William E. Pemberton Learn More Bachman, Caleb. “Ernesto Sábato: A Conscious Choice of Words.” Americas 43 (January/February, 1991): 14-20. A look at Sábato’s life and work. Addresses the dark tone of his novels, as well as comments by critics “who feel that his ‘black hope’ is several shades too dark.” Busette, Cedric. “La familia de Pascual Duarte” and “El túnel”: Correspondences and Divergences in the Exercise of Craft. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994. Little in English is available on Sábato; this study reveals some of his overall concerns, expressed also in The Outsider. Includes bibliographical references. Cheadle, Norman. “Mise en abyme and the Abyss: Two Paintings in Ernesto Sábato’s Trilogy of Novels.” Hispanic Review 63 (Autumn, 1995): 543-553. Discusses Sábato’s use of iconic metaphors in his novels. 610

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Flores, Angel. Spanish American Authors: The Twentieth Century. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1992. A good overall view of Sábato’s work. Offers a brief critical analysis of selected novels and common themes that thread through Sábato’s fiction. Oberhelman, Harley Dean. Ernesto Sábato. New York: Twayne, 1970. An excellent biography of Sábato. Oberhelman brings together the man and his works in one of the best biographies in the Twayne series.

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Gustavo Sainz Mexican novelist Born: Mexico City, Mexico; July 13, 1940 long fiction: Gazapo, 1965 (English translation, 1968); Obsesivos días circulares, 1969; La princesa del palacio de hierro, 1974 (The Princess of the Iron Palace, 1987); Compadre lobo, 1977; Fantasmas aztecas, 1982; Paseo en trapecio, 1985; Muchacho en llamas, 1987; A la salud de la serpiente, 1991; Retablo de inmodernaciones y heresiarcas, 1992; La muchacha que tenía la culpa de todo, 1995; Salto de tigre blanco, 1996; Quiero escribir pero me sale espuma, 1997; La novela virtual: Atrás, arriba, adelante, debajo y entre, 1998; Con tinta sangre del corazón, 2000; A troche y moche, 2002. nonfiction: Gustavo Sainz, 1966 (autobiography).

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ustavo Sainz (gews-TAH-voh saynz), Mexican novelist, critic, and journalist, is best known as a founder of the literature of la onda, a mid-1960’s countercultural movement in Mexico representative of the growing restlessness of youth and defined particularly by a lack of concern toward Mexican national identity. Sainz’s early life was marked by the absence of the mother he did not know until adulthood and the influence of the father who raised him. Engaging his son in adventures such as mountain climbing, Sainz’s father shared his love of literature that eventually spawned an interest in language and writing. Nonetheless, poverty and a broken home were hardships, and the difficulties of his adolescence would later be reflected in his early work. Between 1959 and 1962, Sainz published a number of short stories. He attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where a grant from the Centro Mexicana de Escritores allowed him to complete and preview the novel Gazapo. Initial

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reaction to the work was negative; however, when it was published several years later, the program’s director and others praised the book and welcomed Sainz’s entry into Mexican letters. Published in 1965, Gazapo portrays a week in the lives of a group of middle-class teenagers in the Mexican capital. Seeking refuge in his mother’s vacant apartment, Menelao and his friends play out their fantasies through a series of conversations. Sainz employs several techniques to develop the narrative of the novel, most notably the fragments of tape recordings from which the protagonist splices together his own novel. The collage of real and imagined scenes defines the character’s emotional and sexual self-obsession. Gazapo captures the language and nuances of adolescence in rebellion against meaninglessness and sheer boredom. Gazapo was an immediate best-seller in Mexico and was translated into English, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese. Although its fragmentary narrative, thematic concerns,

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and youthful appeal were criticized by some as overly trendy, others praised the work as marking an important chapter in Mexican literary history. Sainz, along with fellow Mexican author José Agustín, was dubbed a leader of la onda (the happening). This new literature was a colloquial expression of disillusionment, self-indicting and without solutions. Criticized by some as “adolescent,” the literature of la onda lacked the socially comprehensive and epic qualities of Latin American Modernismo, characterized by writers like Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes, and the unambiguous language of Gazapo heralded the emergence of postmodernism in Mexican literature. In 1968 Sainz received a Rockefeller grant to attend the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, where he wrote his second novel. Obsesivos días circulares, complete with a qualifying self-disparaging epigraph, was considered by most to be a disappointing second effort. The language, tone, and complexity were criticized as pretentious, and the work attained little recognition aside from serving as evidence that the author had broken with the genre of la onda. More favorable attention fell on his third novel, The Princess of the Iron Palace, which presents the recollections, dreams, and frustrations of a former department store salesgirl in Mexico City. The novel received critical acclaim and was awarded the prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for Literature. Sainz’s continued success led to a Guggenheim grant to fund his next novel. Published in 1977, Compadre lobo tells the story of a writer and an artist in love with the same woman. Although the work garnered Sainz another grant, this time from the Tinker Foundation, the author himself described Compadre lobo as a “botched . . . narrative essay,” and most critics agreed. A string of novels followed, including Fantasmas aztecas in 1982, his most experimental work. Set during the excavation of an Aztec temple, the narrative moves through numerous unsuccessful attempts to differentiate past from present. Though not widely read, Fantasmas aztecas was praised for its wit and depth. His next novel, Paseo en trapecio, was a commentary on Mexico narrated by a ghost. 614

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Gazapo Most of the action of Gazapo (1965) takes place as the characters drive around Mexico City, searching for something meaningful to do. The action centers on the young and misunderstood Menelao, who has been abandoned in a seedy apartment by his divorced mother. Menelao’s independence is accidental. His mother, divorced from his father, who has married the domineering Matriarca, has gone away, leaving Menelao with no means of support. His father, overcome by his second wife, has sacrificed his son to his indecision. Left to his own devices, Menelao divides his time between Gisela and his friends, with no direction or aim. With precision, Menelao traces his routes through the city, giving the person familiar with Mexico City a very accurate picture of his whereabouts. Two matters preoccupy Menelao and serve as catalysts for the action: his relationship with Gisela, whom he wants to seduce, and the disintegration of his family. He convinces Gisela to go to his apartment, where he makes his advances. Although Menelao is thoroughly infatuated with Gisela, he mistrusts her. He also blames her for the break with his father, who dislikes her because she is of a lower social status. The relationship is further complicated by Menelao’s lies to his friends about having “scored” with Gisela. When they repeat the story in a taxi, the driver, Gisela’s father, overhears and forbids her to see Menelao again. Throughout the novel, nevertheless, the two lovers defy the adults by seeing each other when they should be in school. In Gazapo, the things one generally regards as important are trivialized, while banal things are stressed. This is a reminder of the fact that Menelao, his peers, and the society in which they live are disoriented and confused. In the end, nothing happens. Sainz suggests that reality does not have a structure as a conventional novel does, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. — Stella T. Clark

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By the time we girls would get out of classes, get out of school, right?, we were ready to go crazy. I mean really, those afternoons, oh, we thought we were sooo worldly, and so wild, too, because we’d leave school and go over to the Zero Zone, which was very in then, or someplace like that. . . . That’s how we let our hair down, right? —from The Princess of the Iron Palace (trans. Andrew Hurley)

Sainz has continued to receive the critical praise of his admirers. Rejecting his association with la onda of the 1960’s, Sainz matured as a writer in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and he continues to contribute to the Mexican literary landscape. The process of writing, the function of language within a text, and the role of the writer are recurring concerns in his novels. — Steven Clotzman Learn More D’Lugo, Carol Clark. The Fragmented Novel in Mexico: The Politics of Form. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Sainz is one of several writers discussed in this study that links the fragmentation of narrative to an underlying fragmentation in political and social life that belies the myth of Mexican national unity. Fernandez, Salvador. Gustavo Sainz: Postmodernism and the Mexican Novel. New York: P. Lang, 1999. Provides a comprehensive analysis, attempting to draw some general conclusions about the body of Sainz’s work. Gyruko, Lanin A. “Twentieth Century Fiction.” In Mexican Literature: A History, edited by David William Foster. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. In English, an excellent overview of twentieth century Mexican fiction with some reference to the place of Sainz. 616

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Shaw, Donald L. The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Shaw includes a chapter about Sainz in his examination of Latin American fiction that first appeared in the mid-1970’s. This literature differed from the works published in the preceding “Boom” period: It was more reader-friendly, situated in the here and now, and not readily assimilated into the postmodern movement. Williams, Raymond L. The Postmodern Novel in Latin America: Politics, Culture, and the Crisis of Truth. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. In his chapter on Mexican writers, Williams places Sainz in the “first wave” of the Mexican postmodernist movement.

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Florencio Sánchez Uruguayan playwright Born: Montevideo, Uruguay; January 17, 1875 Died: Milan, Italy; November 7, 1910 drama: Canillita, pr. 1902; M’hijo el dotor, pr. 1903 (My Son, the Lawyer, 1961); La gringa, pr. 1904 (The Foreign Girl, 1942); Barranca abajo, pr. 1905 (Retrogression, 1961; also known as Down the Ravine); Los muertos, pr. 1905 (The Dead, 1979). miscellaneous: Obras completas, 1968 (3 volumes).

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lorencio Sánchez (floh-REHN-syoh SAHN-chays) was born in 1875, the first of eleven children of a middle-class family. His father’s political activities kept the family on the move and prevented the children from receiving much of a formal education. As a young man Sánchez worked as a secretary and in various jobs on newspapers. His first play was written for the entertainment of a club of political protesters to which he belonged. His second attempt was censored by city officials of Rosario, where he was a newspaper reporter, but when its performance was prevented, he worked all night setting it in type and had it ready for the public to read the next morning. He rewrote his first play as a musical comedy, Canillita, which

Bet your dowry on me, and you’ll see how common sense wins. People think because they’ve been down to the university, they know more than an old man that’s passed his whole life in the country behind the plow. —from The Foreign Girl (trans. Alfred Coester)

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takes its title from its newsboy hero. The success of the play put that word into the Argentine language as a nickname for all newsboys. In 1903 Sánchez wrote his first important play, My Son, the Lawyer. During the six years following the success of this tragedy he produced a total of twenty plays, eight long dramas and twelve one-act sketches. He wrote rapidly, often on telegraph blanks, and did his best work in noisy bars and in crowds. He reportedly declared that he needed only one day to complete the four-act The Foreign Girl, called by one critic “the tragedy of the Argentine race.” Critics have pointed out certain technical flaws, but the emotions of the play and the realistic pictures of people and life on the pampas made it Sánchez’s most popular

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The Foreign Girl The Foreign Girl (1942) raises an important issue: What traditions should be preserved in the face of technological advances? Sánchez answers this question in the various types of characters he uses to define the social groups involved in the controversy. Don Nicola is an immigrant landowner who works hard on his farm and expects his laborers to do the same. Privately, his workmen and less ambitious neighbors criticize him because he makes his wife and children get up at two o’clock in the morning to begin their daily chores. One of his neighbors is Don Cantalicio, an easygoing creole farmer deeply in Don Nicola’s debt. Próspero, his son, works for Don Nicola and is in love with Victoria, his employer’s pretty daughter. Cantalicio is unable to pay the debt, but he refuses to give up the property, and he loses the lawsuit that might have let him keep his property. Próspero is fired after María, Don Nicola’s wife, discovers Próspero with her daughter. Two years later, Don Nicola has made many changes to the farm. To make room for a new building, he now

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play. Technically better is Retrogression (sometimes called Down the Ravine), the tragedy of a good gaucho driven to despair and suicide by the unworthy and nagging women about him. Sánchez usually shows neither interest in nor sympathy with the women of his plays, who serve merely to develop his ideas and story. From 1905 on, Sánchez turned his attention to the city and wrote nine plays about the lower classes and five tragedies about the middle and upper classes. These works are characterized by realistic treatment that tends toward naturalism. Sánchez was no follower of Émile Zola, however; he saw a tragic fatality of character and circumstance, but he also had sympathy for his creations as the victims of the society in which they live. In his wish-

plans to have the workmen chop down the ancient ombu tree, symbol of the old-time Argentine gaucho. Old Cantalicio turns up unexpectedly and protests the tree’s removal, saying that it belongs to the land. After angrily mounting his horse, Cantalicio is thrown and badly injured. Victoria nurses him back to health, insisting that he stay with her family, because she is carrying Próspero’s child. Próspero returns, having proved himself a prodigious worker in the outside world, and he is permitted to marry Victoria. The play achieves dramatic tension by contrasting Don Nicola’s desire for quick wealth with the local people’s more relaxed work ethic. Sánchez’s stand is clear: The conflict between Don Nicola and Don Cantalicio is not due to one man working harder than the other, but to Don Nicola’s exploitation of the land and his lack of attachment to the country. The Foreign Girl’s happy ending reflects Latin American society’s positive attitude at the turn of the twentieth century. Sánchez recognizes, however, that native values are in jeopardy, and he urges that modern Latin American society observe a balance between the ancient, local South American customs and the ideas of European industrialism. — Rafael Ocasio

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ing to make them over, he showed similarity with Henrik Ibsen, thereby gaining his nickname, “El Ibsen criollo.” Once he dominated the Argentine and Uruguayan theater, Sánchez longed for a hearing in Europe. Several of his plays had already been translated and played in Italian. In 1909 he persuaded his government to send him to Italy, but soon after arriving there he contracted tuberculosis. On November 7, 1910, the dramatist who had helped introduce realism into the theater of the River Plate died and was buried in Milan. In 1921 the Uruguayan government brought home the ashes of its most distinguished playwright. Sánchez’s writing is uneven, and some of his situations trite and weak. His lasting contribution, however, is that he inspired writers in his own land, and his many good qualities have made his theater a cultural heritage of the region. — Emil Volek

Learn More Costa, René de. “The Dramaturgy of Florencio Sánchez: An Analysis of Barranca abajo.” Latin American Theater Review 7, no. 2 (1974). Costa examines the theatrical techniques and composition of the play. Foster, David W. “Ideological Shift in the Rural Images in Florencio Sánchez’s Theater.” Hispanic Journal 11, no. 1 (1990). Studies how the themes of the countryside and immigration are treated in La gringa and Barranca abajo. Jones, Willis K. “Florencio Sánchez.” In Behind Spanish American Footlights. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966. Sánchez’s work is included in this examination of Spanish American playwrights. _______. “The Gringa Theme in River Plate Drama.” Hispania 25 (1942). A study of plays by Sánchez and other Argentine and Uruguayan playwrights. Richardson, Ruth. Florencio Sánchez and the Argentine Theatre. 1933. Reprint. New York: Gordon Press, 1975. A rare Englishlanguage book about Sánchez. 622

Luis Rafael Sánchez Puerto Rican novelist and playwright Born: Humacao, Puerto Rico; November 17, 1936 long fiction: La guaracha del Macho Camacho, 1976 (Macho Camacho’s Beat, 1980); La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos, 1988. short fiction: En cuerpo de camisa, 1965, revised 1971. drama: La espera, pr. 1959; “Cuento de cucarachita viudita,” wr. 1959; Farsa del amor compradito, pb. 1960; Los ángeles se han fatigado, pb. 1960 (The Angels Are Exhausted, 1964); La hiel nuestra de cada día, pr. 1962, pb. 1976 (Our Daily Bitterness, 1964); Casi el alma: Auto da fe en tres actos, pr. 1964, pb. 1966 (A Miracle for Maggie, 1974); La pasión según Antígona Pérez, pr., pb. 1968 (The Passion According to Antígona Pérez, 1968; also known as The Passion of Antígona Pérez, 1971); Teatro de Luis Rafael Sánchez, pb. 1976 (includes Los ángeles se han fatigado, Farsa del amor compradito, and La hiel nuestra de cada día); Quíntuples, pr. 1984, pb. 1985 (Quintuplets, 1984). nonfiction: Fabulación e ideología en la cuentística de Emilio S. Belaval, 1979; No llores por nosotros, Puerto Rico, 1997.

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he success of his novel Macho Camacho’s Beat catapulted the Puerto Rican playwright, short-story writer, and essayist Luis Rafael Sánchez (lwees rah-FYEHL SAHN-chehz) to international fame. Sánchez was born to a working-class family in a small coastal town in Puerto Rico. He went to San Juan to study theater at the University of Puerto Rico. For a time he moved back and forth between his native land and New York City. Sánchez spent a year at Columbia University, where he studied theater and creative writing. Later he returned to New York to pursue a master’s degree in Spanish literature at New York University. He began but did not complete his doctoral studies at Columbia University; he would receive his Ph.D. in 1973 from the University of Madrid. He then taught Latin American and 623

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Quintuplets Quintuplets (1985) is written for two performers, each playing several roles. Critics have said that it is necessary to consult one’s playbill to make sure that only two performers are involved because each one acts so convincingly in the variety of roles undertaken. Sánchez has called the play a parody of suspense comedy. It is played as a family vaudeville act that, in the course of its unfolding, comments sociopolitically and philosophically on what it means to act and what it means to produce drama. The play is acted out before the delegates at a Conference on Family Affairs. The participants, the Morrison Quintuplets and their father, each occupy one of the play’s six acts, presenting a monologue that details his or her perceptions of what it is to be a member of the Morrison family. Among the Morrisons, Dafne is cast as a bombshell, radiant in a provocative red dress. She rejects traditional femininity but adopts the mask of femininity. In contrast is Bianca, whose sexual identity is not clearly revealed, although it is

Spanish literature at the University of Puerto Rico, occasionally traveling and living abroad. Sánchez began his writing career as a playwright. While there is some low-key experimentalism in his drama, typical of the Latin American scene of the 1960’s, the thrust of his works lies in social criticism, with heavy moralizing, rhetoric, and transparent allegories. His political stance is that of an independentista (represented by the left-wing intellectual elite proposing independence for his native island), which in the Puerto Rico of the late twentieth century had become inextricably entangled with upholding Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution of 1959 as the model for such independence. The mastery of language and the hyperbolism employed in Farsa del amor compradito recall Ramón María del Valle-Inclán’s 624


suggested that she has lesbian tendencies. All three Morrison boys are named Ifigenio, so they adopt names that distinguish them from each other: Baby and Mandrake are particularly telling among these assumed names. The father, Papá Morrison, referred to as El Gran Semental (the great stud), is viewed quite differently by each of the quintuplets. For Dafne, he represents perfection and is to be emulated. For Mandrake, he is the competition as a performer but also in an Oedipal sense. Bianca considers him a controlling, domineering patriarchal archetype. Baby, the least secure of the quintuplets, sees his father as someone whose example he can never live up to no matter how hard he tries. According to Sánchez’s directions, each member of the family improvises his or her part in a vaudevillian style. The play comments stingingly on patriarchy and, indirectly, on the paternalism of the United States toward Puerto Rico, a topic that Sánchez injects into most of his writing. The play’s lengthy stage directions also comment on the meaning of acting and drama; hence, on different levels, Quintuplets is rewarding both to see in performance and to read. — R. Baird Shuman

farcical esperpentos from the early twentieth century. This quality continues through the short stories En cuerpo de camisa and reaches a high point in Macho Camacho’s Beat. Sánchez turns his back on the romantic icon of Puerto Rican cultural identity, the mainly white, peasant jíbaro. Instead, he focuses on the new Puerto Rico that emerged, after postwar industrialization and Americanization, in the cities. In these early works Sánchez starts learning to “write in this new Puerto Rican,” developing a neobaroque language that celebrates popular urban culture, discourse, music, and humor. The Passion According to Antígona Pérez is generally considered one of the highlights of the first period of Sánchez’s work. However, the tragic moral dilemma of the Sophoclean Antigone is considerably weakened in this version, and the story is trans625


formed into a predictable political allegory that criticizes stale stereotypes and situations in Latin America (such as the mutual support of church and state). Read decades later, the drama does not seem to have withstood the ravages of time, history, and failed master ideologies. Indeed, the dictatorship in Sánchez’s apocryphal Latin American “banana republic” bears a striking, if unintentional and ironic, resemblance to Castro’s regime in Cuba. Macho Camacho’s Beat, published originally in Argentina, was an instant success. In this novel Sánchez blends the language of an apocryphal popular hit song, real-life commercial hype, and contemporary urban mass-media culture into a masterful stream of radio advertisement babble that unmasks commercialism, superficial journalism, and popular hyperreal lifestyles propagated by commercial radio, all while criticizing some more serious aspects of Puerto Rican political life, such as all-pervasive corruption. While the novel is also based on some worn-out stereotypes (such as the corrupt senator and his mulatto mistress), it entertains. The reader might even overlook the underlying ideological framework. The protagonist of the novel seems to be the playful use of language, based on colloquial urban popular usage. In 1984 Sánchez’s play Quintuplets was staged, to critical acclaim, in San Juan, New York, Buenos Aires, Santo Domingo,

And it is not a question, ladies and gentlemen, friends, of a foolish little number that fills the repertory of a musical group like I mean the Afro Babies, the Latin Provocatives, the Top of the Top, the Monster Feeling, the Creole Feeling. I mean that it’s not a question of a ditty or some sugary rubbish to sweeten the cheap taste of long-haired types. —from Macho Camacho’s Beat (trans. Gregory Rabassa)

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and Oporto. The play consists of monologues by the five children of the actor The Great Mandrake; criticizing patriarchy, it also deals with the nature of acting and writing. In 1985 Sánchez received a grant from the German academic exchange board and spent that year in Berlin. In 1988 he published La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos, a fictionalized biography of Daniel Santos, a real-life Puerto Rican singer of boleros from the 1940’s and 1950’s who was both a pop-culture idol and a fervent believer in the island’s independence. The text is a hybrid work, a mosaic of essay, fiction, and (pseudo)documentary narrative spiced with fragments of Santos’s best-known romantic and sentimental bolero songs. — Emil Volek Learn More Birmingham-Pokorny, Elba D., ed. The Demythologization of Language, Gender, and Culture and the Re-mapping of Latin American Identity in Luis Rafael Sánchez’s Works. Miami, Fla.: Ediciones Universal, 1999. A collection of essays, some in English and others in Spanish, analyzing the representation of Latin American identity, consumerism, the role of women, patriarchy, Christianity, and other topics in Sánchez’s work. Includes an English-language bibliography. Guinness, Gerald. “Is Macho Camacho’s Beat a Good Translation of La guaracha del Macho Camacho?” In Images and Identities: The Puerto Rican in Two World Contexts, edited by Asela Rodriguez de Laguna. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1987. Explores the techniques of Gregory Rabassa’s translation of the novel, with some alternative renderings. Luis, William. Dance Between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature Written in the United States. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997. Contains a section on Puerto Rican literature written in the United States and compares Sánchez’s work with that of Cuban novelists Oscar Hijuelos and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Navarro, Consuelo. “Loner and Outsider: The Restless ‘Anacobero’ Revisted in Luis Rafael Sanchez’s La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos.” In The Image of the Outsider in Literature, 627


Media, and Society, edited by Will Wright and Steven Kaplan. Pueblo, Colo.: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, University of Southern Colorado, 2002. Daniel Santos, the Puerto Rican singer who is the subject of Sánchez’s fictional biography, was nicknamed anacobero, a Spanish word meaning imp or bohemian. This essay examines Sánchez’s treatment of the bohemian outsider in the book. Perivolaris, John. Puerto Rican Cultural Identity and the Work of Luis Rafael Sánchez. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. One of the first book-length treatments in English. Quintana, Hilda E. “Myth and Reality in Luis Rafael Sánchez’s La pasión según Antígona Pérez.” Revista/Review interamericana 19, nos. 3/4 (1989). Focuses on the use of myth in the novel. Zamora, Lois Parkinson. “Clichés and Defamiliarization in the Fiction of Manuel Puig and Luis Rafael Sánchez.” Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 41, no. 4 (June, 1983): 421. Examines the use of cliché and defamiliarization in the works of the two writers.

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Thomas Sanchez Spanish and Portuguese American novelist Born: Oakland, California; February 26, 1944 long fiction: Rabbit Boss, 1973; Zoot Suit Murders, 1978; Mile Zero, 1989; Day of the Bees, 2000; King Bongo: A Novel of Havana, 2003. nonfiction: Four Visions of America: Henry Miller, Thomas Sanchez, Erica Jong, Kay Boyle, 1977 (with others); Native Notes from the Land of Earthquake and Fire, 1979 (also known as Angels Burning: Native Notes from the Land of Earthquake and Fire, 1987).

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homas Sanchez (SAHN-chays) interweaves historical and current events with fictional narratives of people who live on the margins of society to create powerful social and political commentaries on contemporary American culture. Like many of the characters in his books, Sanchez knows what it means to be an outsider. He was born to a Portuguese mother and a Spanish father who was killed in the Pacific during World War II. His mother and grandmother worked in canning factories to support the family. Sanchez credits his grandmother, an illiterate woman who was a skilled storyteller, with helping him to develop an appreciation of language and literature. When Sanchez was five, his mother married a man who had originally hailed from the Midwest. Although he kept his Spanish surname, Sanchez grew up in “an Anglo-Saxon world” but had little in common with the Anglo-American society. It was then that he began to perceive himself as the “other.” Sanchez’s mother became seriously ill when he was a teenager, and he was sent to the St. Francis School for Boys in northern California. Most of the students were orphans or poor and were from Hispanic, Native American, and African American 629

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Tomorrow morning would be good for Bongo’s business, because tonight people having a good time would do bad things—crash cars, walk through plate-glass windows, fall into swimming pools and go to sleep underwater. . . . All the things Bongo needed to make his up-and-coming one-man insurance office succeed. —from King Bongo

backgrounds. He then attended a community college in Sacramento Valley; at the same time he worked as a ranch hand in the High Sierra with Washo Indians and members of other tribes. His experiences at St. Francis and on the ranch enhanced his knowledge of American Indian culture and provided the material for Rabbit Boss. Sanchez first began to work on Rabbit Boss when he was twenty-one, while attending San Francisco State University in the 1960’s. He was deeply involved in the antiwar movement, Congress for Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After earning a B.A. in 1966 and an M.A. in 1967, he taught at the university and continued to work on the novel. After witnessing a violent protest where students were beaten, he left the country for Spain and there finished Rabbit Boss. Rabbit Boss was published in 1973 after Sanchez returned from Spain. The novel chronicles the lives of four generations of Washo Indians, whose society is slowly decimated by the encroachment of whites on their ancestral lands. Although it begins in 1846, with a chilling description of a young Washo’s close encounter with the ill-fated Donner party, and ends with the death of his great-great grandson in the 1950’s, Rabbit Boss is Sanchez’s attempt to come to terms with the war in Vietnam. He saw the American presence in that nation as an “extension of our westward thrust as a country” and used the white culture’s 631

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subjugation of the Washo tribe as a metaphor for American imperialism. Rabbit Boss was a stunning achievement for a young author. Zoot Suit Murders, Sanchez’s second novel, was published in 1978 and is less complex than Rabbit Boss. Set in Los Angeles during World War II, it is a murder mystery that takes place at the time of the “zoot-suit riots” in 1943. Mexican American gangs clothed in zoot suits clash with sailors and are beaten, stripped, and shaved by the navy men. Oscar Fuss, an undercover agent posing as a social worker, investigates the murder of two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents that has occurred during the riots as well as the fascist and communist

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Mile Zero Mile Zero (1989), Thomas Sanchez’s sweeping vision of Key West, Florida, brilliantly evokes the rich history and lyrical passion of the island. Key West is the southernmost point of the continental United States, where “Mile Zero,” the last highway sign before the Atlantic Ocean, symbolizes the end of the American road. While Key West represents the end for the downtrodden Americans who gravitate there, the island promises hope for refugees fleeing Haiti’s poverty. Sanchez traces the island’s shifting economy from a hub of the cigar industry to “a marijuana republic,” then to “a mere cocaine principality,” lamenting how the drug trade has corrupted the American Dream. Mile Zero’s main character, St. Cloud, is a former antiwar activist who ponders his inability to sacrifice himself for his beliefs. He feels a strange kinship with MK, once a soldier in Vietnam and now a dangerous smuggler who has fled to South America. MK’s mysterious presence and the shadow of Vietnam permeate the book. St. Cloud imagines that his pacifism and MK’s violence are two

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groups who are trying to gain control of the barrio. Again Sanchez takes up the cause of the downtrodden in his portrayal of the people who live in the barrio and are caught in a power struggle between the American government, the communists, and the fascists. Although the book is well written, Sanchez’s treatment of the social and political issues lacks the depth displayed in Rabbit Boss. Sanchez did not publish another novel until 1989, when Mile Zero appeared to critical acclaim. Mile Zero is a richly textured novel dealing with the complex contemporary issues of drug smuggling, money laundering, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), and the influx of Haitian refugees to the

sides of the same coin; after Vietnam, returning soldiers and protesters both found themselves cast out of society. Justo Tamarindo, a Cuban American police officer, drafts St. Cloud to help him prevent the deportation of a Haitian refugee named Voltaire. Voltaire’s sad story reveals how America thrives at the expense of the Third World. Late in the novel, Voltaire escapes from the detention center where he is waiting to be deported. The young, malnourished boy dreams he has reached a heavenly land of plenty at a garish shopping mall before he dies. Meanwhile, Justo pursues Zobop, an enigmatic killer who is roaming the island and leaving voodoo-inspired clues everywhere. After Zobop is killed, Justo learns that the murderer sought purification by destruction, believing that everything must be wiped out before it can be renewed. In Mile Zero, Sanchez signals the necessity of cultural change. Vietnam is over, Justo thinks, but the bodies of the dead refugees augur the arrival of a new devil. America is doomed if it does not change. The novel’s ambiguous ending, in which Justo, who may have contracted AIDS, pulls St. Cloud out of the ocean, brings its readers to mile zero, a place that can be either an ending or a beginning. — Trey Strecker

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United States. Set in Key West, Florida, the novel opens with a powerful juxtaposition of images: The space shuttle has just been launched and flies over waters where Haitian refugees huddle on their overcrowded boats, waiting to enter the United States. St. Cloud, an alcoholic and former Vietnam War activist, is recruited by Cuban-born policeman Justo Tamarindo to act as a translator for a Haitian refugee who has AIDS. Meanwhile, St. Cloud also becomes involved in an investigation to discover the whereabouts of MK, a veteran of the Vietnam War and a highly successful drug smuggler. Interwoven with the stories of MK and the Haitian refugees are strange, disjointed letters from Zobop, a mysterious killer and self-styled prophet, who foretells humankind’s destruction through environmental disaster. Mile Zero is a compelling portrait of the social and political issues that drive modern society as well as an ironic, suspense-filled thriller. More than a decade after Mile Zero, Sanchez produced Day of the Bees, in which Francisco Zermano, a famous Spanish painter, and his beautiful French lover Louise Collard endure the German invasion of France during World War II, fleeing Vichycontrolled Provence. Zermano later returns to occupied Paris, but Collard disappears. Fifty years later, their correspondence is discovered by an American historian who then travels to France to seek out Zermano. The novel received mixed reviews, negative for the melodramatic and predictable rhetoric of the lovers’ correspondence but positive for its inventive manipulation of point of view. It was followed in 2003 (quickly for Sanchez) by a reprise of noir fiction in King Bongo, whose protagonist negotiates political intrigues while hunting down a terrorist who exploded a bomb in a Havana nightclub in pre-war Cuba. — Pegge A. Bochynski Learn More Kirkus Reviews. Review of King Bongo, by Thomas Sanchez. 71, no. 1 (March 15, 2003): 425. Finds the novel to be a straightforward noir, “florid, not quite Chandler.” Marovitz, Sanford E. “The Entropic World of the Washo: Fatality and Self-Deception in Rabbit Boss.” Western American Literature 634

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19 (Fall, 1984). Gives a detailed analysis of the structure, themes, and characters of the novel, focusing on the clash between the Washo culture and the dominant white society. Rieff, D. “The Affirmative Action Novel.” The New Republic 202, no. 14 (April 2, 1990). Review of Mile Zero. Sanchez, Thomas. “An Interview with Thomas Sanchez.” Interview by Kay Bonetti. The Missouri Review 14, no. 2 (1991). Explores how Sanchez’s family background, education, and experience as a social activist have influenced the plots and characterizations of his novels. _______. “The Visionary Imagination.” MELUS 3, no. 2 (1976). Sanchez discusses how his social and political commitments influence his writing, particularly in Rabbit Boss. Skenazy, Paul. “History as Mystery: Or, Who Killed L.A.?” In Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays, edited by David Fine. Rev. ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Compares the treatment of Los Angeles in two mystery novels set in that city: Sanchez’s Zoot Suit Murders and John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions.

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Severo Sarduy Cuban novelist and poet Born: Camagüey, Cuba; February 25, 1937 Died: Paris, France; June 8, 1993 long fiction: Gestos, 1963; De donde son los cantantes, 1967 (From Cuba with a Song, 1972); Cobra, 1972 (English translation, 1975); Maitreya, 1978 (English translation, 1987); Colibrí, 1984; Cocuyo, 1990. short fiction: Pájaros de la playa, 1993. radio plays: Para la voz, 1978 (For Voice: Four Plays, 1985). poetry: Big Bang, 1974; Un testigo fugaz y disfrazado: sonetos, décimas, 1985. nonfiction: Escrito sobre un cuerpo: Ensayos de crítica, 1969 (Written on a Body, 1989); Barroco, 1974; La simulación, 1982; Nueva inestabilidad, 1987; Ensayos generales sobre el barroco, 1987; Cartas, 1996 (correspondence). miscellaneous: El Cristo de la rue Jacob, 1987 (Christ on the Rue Jacob, 1995); Epitafios, imitación, aforismos, 1994; Obra completa, 1999 (2 volumes).

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evero Sarduy (seh-VAY-roh SAHR-dwee) was the most prominent link between twentieth century Latin American culture and the Parisian poststructuralist intellectual gay circles (the Tel Quel group). He was also a promoter of the “boom” of Latin American narrative in France in the 1960’s and after. He was born into a working-class family in a provincial Cuban town; at his birth, it was prophesied that he would become a writer. In 1956 he left for Havana to study medicine. There he joined the splinter group of gay writers who had recently abandoned José Lezama Lima’s journal Orígenes and had begun publishing Ciclón (1955-1957). Yet Sarduy remained dazzled by Lezama, whose work continued to be a major influence on his writing and on his concept of Latin American culture. Following Le636

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zama’s lead, he developed an interest in art criticism, and visual arts would become an important influence on his novels. Sarduy welcomed the Cuban Revolution of 1959, working on the “cultural front” until his departure for France at the end of that year to study art criticism at the Louvre. The intellectual ferment in France in the 1960’s proved too irresistible for him to return to Cuba after his government scholarship expired; he chose to stay in France and became a French citizen in 1967. An emigrant, and therefore a traitor, in the eyes of the Cuban government, Sarduy was ostracized there almost up to his death from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in 1993. Sarduy, however, dutifully maintained his faith in the revolution for many years, in spite of the ongoing savage persecution in Fidel Castro’s Cuba of gays in general and of his literary mentors, Lezama and Virgilio Piñera, in particular. Only much later would he exchange his faith in modern utopia for Buddhism and Afro-Cuban santería; strangely enough, after 1989, the revolution itself took similar steps, selling out its deteriorating rites of “machismo-Leninism” for the local syncretistic Afro-Cuban powers. Yet the revolution to which Sarduy was committed in his heart was found in literature and criticism. Various elements— the Lezamian concept of the baroque (hyperbolic, imagistic,

“Chinese atmosphere, girls, come on!”—the Director steps out of a saffron cloud smelling of burnt grass (yes, the same grass you’re thinking). He steps out of his pagoda of smoke, pensive, hair greased with sweat, eyes of a jade bulldog—two red balls—hands crossed over his chest (is he reciting the Book?); he walks along a dotted line. He shivers, turns green; the opalescent cloud crumbles in the scenery. —from From Cuba with a Song (trans. Suzanne Jill Levine)

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From Cuba with a Song From Cuba with a Song (1967) is not a novel in the traditional sense; rather, Sarduy’s second work of fiction breaks down the founding conventions of the genre: character, plot, and theme. Instead of telling a story in linear fashion, it reads like a verbal jigsaw puzzle composed of three pieces or narrative sequences attached to a “head”—the introductory “Curriculum Cubense.” This first section traces a drawing that helps the reader assemble Sarduy’s experiment in the novel form. An Asian and a black woman flank a blond, white male at the center of the picture. He stands next to Help, one-half of the pair of twins who reappear throughout the work, and close to them the “Waxen Woman,” the face of Death, absorbs the entire scene. The drawing displayed in “Curriculum Cubense,” “a giant four-leaf clover, or a four-headed animal facing the four cardinal points, or a Yoruba sign of the four roads,” fills in the outline of an empty plot. Each figure in the picture corresponds to one of the

and carnivalesque); the French nouveau roman; structuralist semiology; the erotic and hedonistic concept of writing “with/ on/into the body” developed by the poststructuralistic Roland Barthes; Western pop culture; gay and symbolic transvestism; and the new cosmology of the big bang—all gave rise to a joyous syncretistic Caribbean literary concoction that Sarduy called neobaroque. He was an extremely self-conscious writer, and his theories crisscross both his essays (such as those in Written on a Body) and narratives. Sarduy wrote his first novel, Gestos, while still in Cuba in 1959, dealing with a terrorist act in Havana under the waning dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Gestos is an experimental exercise inspired both by the early nouveau roman and by action painting. In France he worked for the radio, covering scientific topics. 638

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three fictions that make up the novel. The Chinese and the black woman become protagonists of their own tales in her piece. The white man, Mortal Pérez, fills the center of the drawing since he is in a relation of desire to the two women. Yet he is also the center of his own supreme fiction, “The Entry of Christ in Havana,” first as Everyman and then as a baroque Christ figure. The three tales are designed to depict the linguistic and erotic sensibility proper to the racial layers superimposed on the mosaic of Cuban culture: the Chinese, African, and Spanish elements. The novel’s linguistic texture constructs a verbal archetype or reproduction of Cuba. It appears that the pieces of the puzzle fit together in the totality of a culture: a whole Cuba integrated by its racial-ethnic components, as reflected in the drawing. Metaphor and poetic description qualify the Chinese tale; dialogue, colloquial speech, and a mock tragic tone exhibit the African flair for drama in the second tale. The last section testifies to the origins of Cuban lexicon and intonation in Castilian Spanish; it also bears witness to the Hispanic legacy of mysticism. — Adriana Méndez Rodenas

The intimate knowledge of the medium would reflect in his experimental radio plays. In his own narrative work science seeps through in many ways, but it takes up a carnivalized form, degraded as it is to yet another manifestation of contemporary pop culture. In 1966 Sarduy became editor of the Latin American collection for Editions du Seuil. From Cuba with a Song puts to the test the later, more experimental nouveau roman and his own neobaroque approach in the search for Cuban cultural identity. Sarduy, himself of Cuban Chinese origin, sees Cuban cultural idiosyncrasy as a result of an interaction of three cultural components: Spanish, coming with discovery and conquest; African, introduced through black slaves after the indigenous population disappeared; and Chinese, brought to Cuba in the last century with the agricultural 639

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workers, after slavery was abolished. The text exploits, plays on, and parodies cultural stereotypes and, at the same time, explodes traditional narrative forms. The literary result is exhilarating and perplexing. Language is the true protagonist of this antinovel. The next work, Cobra, is a perplexing exercise in narrative experiment. Completely cosmopolitan in its themes, it nonetheless remains profoundly Caribbean in its popular and carnivalesque undertones. The antinarrative constructs and dismantles the story of a beautiful transvestite unhappy about his ugly feet, a motorcycle gang and Tibetan rituals, and the sadistic castration performed by Dr. Ktazob (a multilingual pun meaning “penis cutter”) in pursuit of the phantom of feminine perfection. This search for unattainable perfection is paralleled by the topsy-turvy writing understood as verbal transvestism. Cobra received the coveted Medicis Prize in 1972. In the 1970’s Sarduy made several trips to India. Maitreya uses the myth of the last Buddha and plays on the theme of exile and flight all around the planet, from Java to Cuba, Miami, New York, and the Islamic world. Colibrí returns to a Latin American setting and cultural intertexts; its scene is a homosexual brothel at the edge of the Amazonian jungle. Cocuyo’s main theme is voyeurism. — Emil Volek Learn More Blanchard, Marc. “Site Unseen: Cuba on the Rue Jacob.” Sites 5 (Spring, 2001): 79-88. Profile of Sarduy focusing on his retention of “cultural difference” after settling in France. Bush, Andrew. “On Exemplary and Postmodern Simulation: Robert Coover and Severo Sarduy.” Comparative Literature 44 (Spring, 1992): 174-193. Uses Sarduy and Robert Coover’s works as case studies in discussing the relationship between theory and fiction. Cooppan, Vilashini. “Mourning Becomes Kitsch: The Aesthetics of Loss in Severo Sarduy’s Cobra.” In Loss: The Politics of Mourning, edited by David L. Eng and David Kazanjian. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Examines the 640

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treatment of mourning and its relation to cultural identity and postcolonialism in Sarduy’s novel. Gosser, Mary Ann. “Cobra.” In Critical Essays on the Literatures of Spain and Spanish America, edited by Luis T. González-delValle and Julio Baena. Boulder, Colo.: Society of Spanish and Spanish American Studies, 1991. Useful for a general reader in English. Kushigian, Julia. Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition: In Dialogue with Borges, Paz, and Sarduy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991. Studies Sarduy’s Asian connection, the theme of oriental exoticism, and Asian influence on Latin American literature. Montero, Oscar. The Name Game: Writing/Fading Writer in “De donde son los cantantes.” Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Focuses on the narrative experiment. Rivero-Potter, Alicia, ed. Between the Self and the Void: Essays in Honor of Severo Sarduy. Boulder, Colo.: Society of Spanish and Spanish American Studies, 1998. A collection of essays from a variety of perspectives summing up Sarduy’s career. Salgado, Cesar Augusto. “Hybridity in New World Baroque Theory.” Journal of American Folklore 112 (Summer, 1999): 316331. Discusses Sarduy’s “neobaroque” theory.

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Gary Soto Mexican American poet and memoirist Born: Fresno, California; April 12, 1952 poetry: The Elements of San Joaquin, 1977; The Tale of Sunlight, 1978; Where Sparrows Work Hard, 1981; Black Hair, 1985; Who Will Know Us?, 1990; A Fire in My Hands, 1990; Home Course in Religion, 1991; New and Selected Poems, 1995; A Natural Man, 1999; One Kind of Faith, 2003. long fiction: Nickel and Dime, 2000; Poetry Lover, 2001; Amnesia in a Republican County, 2003. children’s literature: Baseball in April, and Other Stories, 1990; Taking Sides, 1991; Neighborhood Odes, 1992 (poetry); Pacific Crossing, 1992; The Skirt, 1992; Too Many Tamales, 1993; Local News, 1993; Crazy Weekend, 1994; Jesse, 1994; Boys at Work, 1995; Canto Familiar, 1995 (poetry); The Cat’s Meow, 1995; Chato’s Kitchen, 1995; Off and Running, 1996; Buried Onions, 1997; Novio Boy, 1997 (play); Petty Crimes, 1998; Big Bushy Mustache, 1998; Chato Throws a Pachanga, 1999; Chato and the Party Animals, 1999; Nerdlania, 1999 (play); Jesse De La Cruz: A Profile of a United Farm Worker, 2000; My Little Car, 2000; Body Parts in Rebellion: Hanging Out with Fernie and Me, 2002 (poetry); If the Shoe Fits, 2002; The Afterlife, 2003; Chato Goes Cruisin’, 2004. nonfiction: Living up the Street: Narrative Recollections, 1985; Small Faces, 1986; Lesser Evils: Ten Quartets, 1988; A Summer Life, 1990 (39 short vignettes based on his life); The Effect of Knut Hamsun on a Fresno Boy, 2000. edited texts: California Childhood: Recollections and Stories of the Golden State, 1988; Pieces of the Heart: New Chicano Fiction, 1993.

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ary Soto (GA-ree SOH-toh), who has been called one of the finest natural talents among Mexican American writers, was born on April 12, 1952, to Manuel and Angie (Trevino)

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Soto. Although his parents were born in the United States, Soto’s grandfather, Frank Soto, immigrated there to escape economic and political instability in Mexico. He met his future wife, Paola, in Fresno. Soto’s parents and grandparents were members of the working class. Every day, the Soto family would join other Mexican American families from their barrio in Fresno and travel to the lush San Joaquin Valley to pick grapes and oranges. At a young age, Gary experienced the grimness of working in mind-deadening, physically exhausting labor, picking cotton in the fields, collecting aluminum cans, all to help his family survive. The lushness of the valley juxtaposed with the backbreaking labor his family had to endure because of their poverty would figure prominently in Soto’s poetry and fiction.

M. L. Martinelle

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When Soto was five years old, tragedy struck his family; Manuel Soto died as a result of a factory accident at the age of twenty-seven. The father’s death left Soto’s mother to raise him, his older brother, Rick, and his younger sister Debra. Manuel’s death created financial and emotional hardships for the family. They never discussed his death, never dealt with their individual or communal grief. The silence created an emotional chasm for Gary. The effects of Soto’s father’s death have become a key issue in Soto’s writings as he attempts to reconcile his love for his father and his feelings of abandonment with the numbing effects of silence. Soto grew up in a Catholic family and attended Catholic and private schools. However, his family never stressed the importance of obtaining an education or had books in the house or encouraged him to read. His mother and father left high school to get married when they were eighteen. Even though Soto received no encouragement at home to work hard in school, he did graduate from high school in 1970 and enrolled in Fresno City College to avoid the draft. A key event occurred in Soto’s life after enrolling in college. While browsing through the college library, he discovered a collection of poems titled The New American Poetry. After reading several of the poems, he immediately began writing poetry and discovered his poetic voice. He had found his niche. Seeking the companionship and intellectualism of other writers, Soto transferred to California State University, Fresno, and enrolled in Philip Levine’s creative writing class. This decision was life-altering. From 1972 to 1973, Levine nurtured and encouraged Soto’s talent as a poet. As he created more poetry under the tutelage of Levine, Soto began to discover his own sense of aloneness, a feeling of being alienated from two cultures, his own because of his education and the Anglo world, which both encouraged and rejected him. Through his writings, he delves into the theme of alienation and learns that it is a human, universal emotion that is not particular to him. In 1974, Soto graduated magna cum laude from California State University, Fresno. In 1975 he married Carolyn Oda, a native of Fresno and the daughter of Japanese-American farmers 644

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A Summer Life A Summer Life (1990) is a collection of thirty-nine vignettes based on Gary Soto’s life in California. The book is arranged in three sections covering his early childhood, preadolescence, and the time prior to adulthood. Soto’s Latino heritage forms a background, and he identifies himself with this community in his descriptions of everyday realities: his grandfather’s wallet is “machine tooled with MEXICO and a campesino and donkey climbing a hill”; his mother pounds “a round steak into carne asada” and crushes “a heap of beans into refritos.” Soto’s experiences include the sounds of Spanish and the objects of the barrio, but they seem universal. At heart, the book is a child’s movement toward self-awareness. In the first section, his world is bounded by his neighborhood and his eyes see this world in the sharp, concrete images of childhood. “I was four and already at night thinking of the past,” he writes, “The cat with a sliver in his eye came and went. . . . the three sick pups shivered and blinked twilight in their eyes . . . the next day they rolled over into their leaf-padded graves.” In the last story in A Summer Life, “The River,” Soto is seventeen, and it is the 1960’s, the hippie era. He and his friend Scott have traveled to Los Angeles to find themselves amid the “mobs of young people in leather vests, bell-bottoms, beads, Jesus thongs, tied-dyed shirts, and crowns of flowers.” As the two of them bed down that night in an uncle’s house, Soto seems to find that instant between childhood and adulthood, between the past and the present: “I thought of Braley Street and family, some of whom were now dead, and how when Uncle returned from the Korean War, he slept on a cot on the sunporch. . . . We had yet to go and come back from our war and find ourselves a life other than the one we were losing.” In this moment, Soto speaks for all readers who recall that thin edge between yesterday and today. — Diane Andrews Henningfeld

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When the police left, we came back and some of the nationals made up stories of how they were almost caught—how they outraced the police. Some of the stories were so convoluted and unconvincing that everyone laughed mentiras, especially when one described how he overpowered a policeman, took his gun away, and sold the patrol car. We laughed and laughed, happy to be there to make up a story. —from “Black Hair”

who had been imprisoned in internment camps during World War II. At first, his family opposed their marriage, hoping he would marry a good Mexican American girl. Soto discusses their initial reaction and eventual consent in one of his prose memoirs, Small Faces. Five years after they were married, Carolyn gave birth to their daughter, Mariko. Soto earned a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine in 1976. He then became writerin-residence at San Diego State University but left to become a lecturer in the Chicano studies department at the University of California at Berkeley. There, in 1977 he received an associate professorship in both Chicano studies and English. In 1992 he became a senior lecturer in the English department. While fulfilling his teaching responsibilities, Soto continued to write poetry. In 1977 his first volume of poetry, The Elements of San Joaquin, a book he dedicated in part to his grandmother, was published and earned several literary awards. In this volume, Soto gives voice to the grim, impoverished, violent, and souldeadening world of his childhood: a world that was often filled with human suffering caused by his family’s poverty and their inability to become upwardly mobile. He conveys his feelings by using a street as a major motif. Although the street implies movement and a journey, Soto uses the street to imply a deadend existence on the mean streets of his neighborhood. 646

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In his next two volumes of poetry, The Tale of Sunlight and Where Sparrows Work Hard, Soto seems to have exorcised his demons because he tempers his social commentary on the poverty his family endured and instead focuses on the human suffering poverty causes. The street motif still exists in these works, but it is used to show that mobility is possible. Creatively, 1985 proved to be a very important year for Soto: He published his fourth volume of poetry, Black Hair, in which he fondly remembers his family and friends. He also attempted a new genre, autobiographical prose, when his Living up the Street: Narrative Recollections was published and earned for him an American Book Award. In this memoir and the one that immediately followed it, Small Faces, Soto vividly re-creates the racially mixed, laboringclass neighborhood in which he was raised, the struggles his family endured to provide the children with a safe environment, and the central dilemma of a life continually lived on the margins as a product of two cultures. After writing poems and autobiographical memoirs, Soto ventured into children’s literature with the publication of Baseball in April, and Other Stories. It immediately earned critical recognition, including the Best Book For Young Adults award from the American Library Association. The eleven short stories focus on Mexican American boys and girls and their fears, aspirations, angst, and desires as they enter adolescence. In this collection and his other fiction for children, Jesse, Taking Sides, and Pacific Crossing, Soto depicts real-life situations. Even though his writings are set in ethnic neighborhoods, the conflicts and situations in which he places his characters are universal. To depict these situations, he uses a quiet, often humorous and empathetic tone. Soto’s consistent attention to his craft has earned him the respect of critics and readers. His numerous awards and fellowships, among which include the Guggenheim Fellowship and being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, attest to his literary genius and his versatility. Gary Soto is a gifted writer who transcends the particular he knew and re-creates a universalized world that touches all of his readers. — Sharon K. Wilson 647

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Learn More Erben, Rudolf, and Ute Erben. “Popular Culture, Mass Media, and Chicano Identity in Gary Soto’s Living up the Street and Small Faces.” MELUS 17, no. 3 (Fall, 1991/1992): 43-52. The authors explore the conflict of dual consciousness and social problems that Soto examines. Ganz, Robin. “Gary Soto.” In Updating the Literary West, sponsored by the Western Literature Association. Ft. Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1997. This collection of essays about writers with a connection to the Western United States includes a discussion of Soto’s treatment of the Mexican American experience in his poetry and prose. Manson, Michael Tomasek. “Poetry and Masculinity on the Anglo/Chicano Border: Gary Soto, Robert Frost, and Robert Haas.” In The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era, edited by Aliki Barnstone, Michael Tomasek Manson, and Carol J. Singley. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997. Examines Soto’s treatment of cross-cultural values and masculinity and their relationship to Puritanism and Calvinism in Home Course in Religion. Compares the treatment of these subjects in Soto’s poetry with the handling of these subjects in the poems of Frost and Haas. Olivares, Julian. “The Streets of Gary Soto.” Latin America Literary Review 18, no. 35 (January-June, 1990): 32-49. Olivares explores Soto’s ability to universalize the situations his characters face. Soto, Gary. “Gary Soto.” http://www.garysoto.com/. Accessed March 22, 2005. The author’s Web site has a list of his books, information on his recent accomplishments, and answers to frequently asked questions.

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Virgil Suárez Cuban American novelist and poet Born: Havana, Cuba; 1962 long fiction: Latin Jazz, 1989; The Cutter, 1991; Havana Thursdays, 1995; Going Under, 1996. short fiction: Welcome to the Oasis, and Other Stories, 1992. poetry: You Come Singing, 1998; Garabato Poems, 1999; In the Republic of Longing, 1999; Palm Crows, 2001; Banyan, 2001; Guide to the Blue Tongue, 2002. edited texts: Iguana Dreams: New Latino Fiction, 1992 (with Delia Poey); Paper Dance: Fifty-five Latino Poets, 1995 (with Victor Hernández and Leroy V. Quintana); Little Havana Blues: A Cuban-American Literature Anthology, 1996 (with Poey); American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement, 2001 (with Ryan G. Van Cleave); Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America, 2002 (with Van Cleave). miscellaneous: Spared Angola: Memories from a Cuban-American Childhood, 1997 (short stories, poetry, and essays); Infinite Refuge, 2002 (sketches, poetry, memories, and fragments of short stories).

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irgil Suárez (VER-hihl SWAH-rays), the son of a pattern cutter and a piecemeal seamstress who worked in the sweatshops of Havana, left Cuba in 1970 with his family. After four years in Madrid, Spain, they went to Los Angeles. A man of many interests and prolific literary output, Suárez raised three daughters with his wife in Florida. His multitude of works in numerous genres deal with immigration, exile, and acclimatization to life and culture in the United States as well as the hopes and struggles of Cubans and Cuban Americans who had to abandon their island home under political duress. A self-confessed obsessive, whether about his family, his hobbies, or his writing, Suárez is preoccupied by voice. He 649

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cites physical place as paramount in the process of finding and producing his voice, whether in prose or poetry. Initially recognized for his fiction, Suárez has written poetry since 1978, though he only began to publish it in the mid1990’s. He believes that voice is most important in poetry because of poetry’s space limitations. He feels so strongly about maintaining the authenticity of his personal voice that he discards any poem he believes does not respect and represent his voice. That voice is of an immigrant who, although he has spent the majority of his life in his adopted land and does not expect to return to Cuba, still does not feel completely acclimated. Suárez writes about what he knows: the nature and travails of exile. Appropriately, given his mixed feelings, Suárez writes in English and includes a sprinkling of Spanish, reiterated in English. Nonetheless, critics characterize Suárez’s style as unwavering, definitive, and direct. Suárez finished his secondary schooling in Los Angeles and received a B.A. in creative writing from California State University, Long Beach, in 1984. He studied at the University of Arizona and received an M.F.A. in creative writing from Louisiana State University in 1987. In addition to having been a visiting professor at the University of Texas in Austin in 1997, Suárez has taught at the University of Miami, Florida International Univer-

Xavier, the young-urban Cuban-American. The YUCA, the equivalent of yuppie. Business at hand at all times. In haste, no time to waste. Twenty-four hours a day not being enough time. Seven days a week. No time to rest, for in this magic city of Miami, the Sun Capital, there were many deals to be made, and whoever struck first struck big by making the money. —from “Sonny Manteca’s Blues”

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sity, Miami-Dade Community College, and Florida State University in Tallahassee. Suárez’s poems alone have appeared in more than 250 magazines and journals. He has also been a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Tallahassee Democrat. He is a member of PEN, the Academy of American Poets, the Associated Writing Programs, and the Modern Language Association. 651

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The Cutter The Cutter (1991) is the story of a young man’s desperate attempt to leave Cuba and its Communist regime. The novel is divided into five sections that mark the stages of his journey away from the island. The protagonist, Julian Campos, is twenty years old and a university student who has recently returned to Havana after having completed his years of military service. He has been waiting to leave Cuba ever since his parents left five years earlier, and he thinks that the time has finally come—until the government tells him he must do additional “voluntary work” if he wants to leave Cuba. The work is slave labor, and Julian and his coworkers are mistreated. Suárez depicts Cuba at its worst, leading the reader to understand why Julian is compelled to leave the country. Julian grows increasingly despondent about his prospects for leaving Cuba, particularly when he receives the belated news of his grandmother’s death. When Julian is finally released from the fields and permitted to go home, he realizes that he will never receive an exit notice. His neighbors plan to escape, and Julian joins them. Their group is infiltrated by a government spy, however, and his neighbors are killed. In the novel’s final section, Julian reaches the United States. In contrast to most of the Cuban characters, those in the United States are kind to him and are eager to help him adjust to his new country. Julian clearly enjoys his newfound freedom, and, though he appears reluctant to search for his parents, the novel ends with a suggestion that ultimately he will find refuge with them. Suárez’s own family left Cuba in 1970, about the time at which this novel is set. The Cutter is his attempt to come to grips with his native Cuba. The novel focuses mainly on the desire for independeonce, but it is also about the loss of innocence and of the belief that if one does the right thing, good will be the end result. — Margaret Kent Bass

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Nominated for five Pushcart Prizes, Suárez was a featured lecturer at the Smithsonian Institution in 1997. He received a Florida State Individual Artist grant in 1998 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2001-2002 to write a poetry work. His volume Garabato Poems was named Generation Ñ magazine’s Best Book of 1999. He served as a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship panel judge in 1999 and a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation panelist in 2000. — Debra D. Andrist Learn More Alvarez-Borland, Isabel. Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. Suárez’s work is included in this examination of literature written by Cuban natives living in the United States. _______. “Displacements and Autobiography in Cuban American Fiction.” World Literature Today 68, no. l (1994): 43-49. Analyzes the theme of exile and displacement in the work of Suárez and other Cuban American writers. Hospital, Carolina, and Jorge Cantera, eds. A Century of Cuban Writers in Florida: Selected Prose and Poetry. Sarasota, Fla.: Pineapple Press, 1996. Suárez is one of the thirty-three writers whose work is included in this anthology of Cubans who have lived, or who are living today, in Florida. The introduction by the editors describes the historical importance of the Cuban connection to Florida’s heritage. Suárez, Virgil. “A Perfect Hotspot.” In Hispanic American Literature, edited by Rodolfo Cortina. Lincolnwood, Ill.: NTC, 1998. Suárez’s short story is included in this anthology. _______. “Song for the Royal Palms of Miami.” In ReMembering Cuba: Legacy of a Diaspora, edited by Andrea O’Reilly Herrera. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Suárez’s work is included in this collection of writing by Cubans living in other countries.

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Sheila Ortiz Taylor Mexican American novelist Born: Los Angeles, California; September 25, 1939 long fiction: Faultline, 1982; Spring Forward/Fall Back, 1985; Southbound, 1990; Coachella, 1998. poetry: Slow Dancing at Miss Polly’s, 1989. nonfiction: Emily Dickinson: A Bibliography, 1850-1966, 1968; Imaginary Parents, 1996.

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heila Ortiz Taylor (SHEE-lah ohr-TEES TAY-lohr) is often considered the first Chicana lesbian novelist. Her first and most acclaimed novel, Faultline, was republished in 1995 because of increased awareness of its importance not only in lesbian and Chicano literature but as a significant work of fiction. The novel has been published in British, German, Greek, Italian, and Spanish translations, and in 1995 film rights were bought by Joseph May Productions. The novel also won several awards, although it was often neglected by critics and mainstream reviewers. Ortiz Taylor grew up in a Mexican American family in Southern California, an experience she records in Imaginary Parents. The book, a mixture of fact and fiction, is true to the spirit of her childhood in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Her older sister’s color prints accompany the text and represent a different version of the shared past. In her preface Ortiz Taylor writes that the book could be called autobiography, memoir, poetry, nonfiction, creative nonfiction, fiction, or codex (a manuscript book); she herself calls it an ofrenda, an offering of small objects with big meanings set out in order. The book reimagines the past and recreates the parents and extended family who have since died; it also provides an insightful Chicana perspective into what she calls the strange Southern California culture of the war years. 654

Sheila Ortiz Taylor

I gaze into the cake, a sheet cake decorated to look like the swimming pool the Halversons will build next summer. Pink children swim in blue-green frosting. We lift our voices in song. Mrs. Halverson fires off little bulbs from her camera. I am happy, at my first real birthday party. I have come here without my big sister. —from Imaginary Parents

It was during the post-World War II years of the early 1950’s that Taylor, then twelve or thirteen years old, realized that she wanted to write. She attended California State University at Northridge and graduated magna cum laude. She earned her M.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1964, and her Ph.D. in English from the same university in 1973 with a dissertation on “Form and Function in the Picaresque Novel.” Taylor’s own novels often follow the episodic traditions of the picaresque, although they transform the rogue hero into an adventurous lesbian protagonist who challenges boundaries and resists stereotyped categorization. In Faultline the main character, Arden Benbow, who was an English major in college, is the mother of six when she falls in love with another woman. Together they create a loving home life, which includes an African American gay male drag queen as a baby-sitter, an assortment of pets (as many as three hundred rabbits), and various friends and neighbors who are attracted by Arden’s energy and enthusiasm. Although he himself is involved with another woman and does not want to be bothered with the children, Arden’s former husband files a custody suit on the grounds that Arden’s lesbianism makes her an unfit mother. Arden refuses to pretend to be someone she is not, and her life-affirming spirit triumphs. The book ends with a legally nonbinding double wedding between Arden and her lover Alice and between two of their gay male friends. 655

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Faultline Faultline (1982) is a comic novel with a serious message. Sheila Ortiz Taylor creates a shining cast of characters who speak about their relationships to the protagonist, Arden Benbow, as Arden battles her ex-husband Malthus for custody of their six children. Malthus has never considered women equal to men, and his ego is hurt when Arden prefers living with a woman to staying with him in their dull marriage. The theme of acceptance of individual differences runs throughout the novel. It is not until Arden and Alice Wicks fall in love that Arden can see what it means to free oneself to live fully and to develop the creative spirit. Alice too has married because that is what society expected of her, but she learns that she must be herself and follow her own spirit. The faultline of the title refers to the geography of the setting in Southern California, but it is also a metaphor for unpredictability and the need for adaptability and acceptance of reality. One chapter is in the words of a professor of geophysics who specializes in plate tectonics, which includes the study of the faultlines where earthquakes occur. Earthquakes, he says, are dynamic reactions to changes in the earth’s crust that remind people of their mortality and the need to live with enthusiasm. People should not waste their time being prejudiced against others. Although he is a scientist, the professor knows—as Malthus does not—that there is more to life than “facts.” In Faultine, characters who are rigid and domineering prove to be unhappy, whatever material wealth they may have. Faultline emphasizes the need for people to celebrate life rather than to oppress others. Arden is, after all, not only a fit mother but an outstanding one who brings to her children and to all around her a sense of fairness and decency and a joy in living and loving. — Lois A. Marchino

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A similar sense of hopefulness and triumph in the face of opposition, which some reviewers have referred to as utopian, pervades Spring Forward/Fall Back, and the same spirit informs Taylor’s poetry and other writings. Taylor has a keen eye for detail and is clear about oppression and stagnated prejudicial attitudes. Her writings also show survival techniques in a hostile culture, among them the invocation of humor, love, and goodwill toward others. Her protagonists refuse to be beaten down, and they enjoy and respect life. Taylor’s professional career has been in teaching English at several universities, most notably at Florida State University, where she began teaching literature in the early 1970’s. Her courses include many on women writers, and she has served as Director of Women’s Studies. She has given many public readings nationally and internationally, and in 1991 she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach at the University of ErlangenNürnberg. Taylor’s work shows a continuing fascination with the novel form and its many variations. She sees herself as an author who creates convincing forgeries that are intended to illuminate life. Her works show her challenging herself by shifting subject matter, style, and approach. She never repeats simple patterns or formulas from previous works. This approach to writing is also reflected in her central characters, who meet challenges with creativity and vitality and accept risk as a part of the lived life. Many readers have found Taylor’s texts to be engaging. Her work is therefore not restricted to special audiences. Like the literal lesson of the geological faultlines where earthquakes appear, Taylor’s works illustrate that chance and change are inevitable, that for individuals and societies it is important to avoid rigidity, and that challenges must be met actively with love, humor, and imagination. — Lois A. Marchino Learn More Bruce-Novoa, Juan. RetroSpace: Collected Essays on Chicano Literature. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1990. Asserts that Taylor’s writings show that there is no monolithic Chicano 657

Sheila Ortiz Taylor

culture or literature and cites Faultline as the best novel written by a Chicana. _______. “Sheila Ortiz Taylor’s Faultline: A Third Woman Utopia.” Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura 6 (Spring, 1991). A lengthy discussion about the novel. Castillo, Debra A., and María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba. Border Women: Writing from La Frontera. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. This examination of writing by women who live along the United States-Mexican border includes an analysis of Taylor’s work. The book describes how these women writers are rethinking traditional ideas about the border. Christian, Karen. “Will the ‘Real Chicano’ Please Stand Up? The Challenge of John Rechy and Sheila Ortiz Taylor to Chicano Essentialism.” Americas Review 20 (Summer, 1992). An excellent extended treatment of the importance of gay and lesbian writing in Chicano literature, with special attention to the style and content of Faultline. Harris, Jeane. “Sheila Ortiz Taylor (1939).” In Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Sandra Pollack and Denise D. Knight. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Contains an essay about Taylor, featuring biographical information, an analysis of her writing, and a discussion of the critical reception her work has received. Also includes a bibliography. Zimmerman, Bonnie. Safe Sea of Women. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. Taylor is one of several writers discussed in this study of lesbian fiction in the late twentieth century.

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Notable Latino Writers Volume 3 Piri Thomas — Jose Yglesias

659 - 1000 Essays Appendices Indexes from The Editors of Salem Press




First Printing


Table of Contents Key to Pronunciation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xlv Complete List of Articles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xlvii Piri Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rodolfo Usigli . . . . . . . . . . . Luis Miguel Valdez . . . . . . . . . Luisa Valenzuela . . . . . . . . . . César Vallejo . . . . . . . . . . . . Mario Vargas Llosa . . . . . . . . . Maruxa Vilalta . . . . . . . . . . . José Antonio Villarreal . . . . . . . Victor Villaseñor . . . . . . . . . . Helena María Viramontes . . . . . Hugo Wast . . . . . . . . . . . . . Agustín Yáñez. . . . . . . . . . . . Jose Yglesias . . . . . . . . . . . . . Essays Latino and Latin American Drama Latino Long Fiction . . . . . . . . Latin American Long Fiction . . . Latino Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . Latin American Poetry . . . . . . . Latino Short Fiction . . . . . . . . Latin American Short Fiction . . . Appendices More Latino Authors . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . Electronic Resources . . . . . . . . Chronological List of Authors . . . Indexes Genre Index . . . . . . . . . . . . Geographical Index . . . . . . . . Personages Index. . . . . . . . . . Title Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . xliii

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Complete List of Articles Volume 1 Demetrio Aguilera Malta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Isidora Aguirre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Ciro Alegría . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Claribel Alegría . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Isabel Allende . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Ignacio Manuel Altamirano . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Julia Alvarez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Jorge Amado . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Rudolfo A. Anaya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Mário de Andrade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Reinaldo Arenas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Roberto Arlt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Juan José Arreola . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Miguel Ángel Asturias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Mariano Azuela . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Jimmy Santiago Baca . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Raymond Barrio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Eduardo Barrios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Adolfo Bioy Casares . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 María Luisa Bombal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 Jorge Luis Borges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Ignácio de Loyola Brandão . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Aristeo Brito . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Julia de Burgos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 Guillermo Cabrera Infante . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 Ernesto Cardenal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Alejo Carpentier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 Alejandro Casona. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 Carlos Castaneda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Ana Castillo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Lorna Dee Cervantes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Denise Chávez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Sandra Cisneros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200 xlvii



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José Lezama Lima . . . . . . . . Osman Lins . . . . . . . . . . . . José Lins do Rego . . . . . . . . Clarice Lispector . . . . . . . . . Eduardo Machado . . . . . . . . Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis Eduardo Mallea. . . . . . . . . . José Julián Martí . . . . . . . . . Gabriela Mistral. . . . . . . . . . Nicholasa Mohr. . . . . . . . . . Alejandro Morales . . . . . . . . Pablo Neruda . . . . . . . . . . . Juan Carlos Onetti . . . . . . . . Judith Ortiz Cofer . . . . . . . . Nicanor Parra. . . . . . . . . . . Octavio Paz . . . . . . . . . . . . Miguel Piñero . . . . . . . . . . Mary Helen Ponce . . . . . . . . Elena Poniatowska . . . . . . . . Manuel Puig . . . . . . . . . . . Rachel de Queiroz . . . . . . . . Horacio Quiroga . . . . . . . . . John Rechy . . . . . . . . . . . . Alfonso Reyes . . . . . . . . . . . Alberto Ríos. . . . . . . . . . . . Tomás Rivera . . . . . . . . . . . Augusto Roa Bastos. . . . . . . . Abraham Rodriguez, Jr. . . . . . Richard Rodriguez . . . . . . . . José Rubén Romero . . . . . . . Juan Ruiz de Alarcón. . . . . . . Juan Rulfo . . . . . . . . . . . . Ernesto Sábato . . . . . . . . . . Gustavo Sainz . . . . . . . . . . . Florencio Sánchez . . . . . . . . Luis Rafael Sánchez . . . . . . . Thomas Sanchez . . . . . . . . . Severo Sarduy. . . . . . . . . . . xlix

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Volume 3 Piri Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rodolfo Usigli . . . . . . . . . . . Luis Miguel Valdez . . . . . . . . . Luisa Valenzuela . . . . . . . . . . César Vallejo . . . . . . . . . . . . Mario Vargas Llosa . . . . . . . . . Maruxa Vilalta . . . . . . . . . . . José Antonio Villarreal . . . . . . . Victor Villaseñor . . . . . . . . . . Helena María Viramontes . . . . . Hugo Wast . . . . . . . . . . . . . Agustín Yáñez. . . . . . . . . . . . Jose Yglesias . . . . . . . . . . . . . Essays Latino and Latin American Drama Latino Long Fiction . . . . . . . . Latin American Long Fiction . . . Latino Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . Latin American Poetry . . . . . . . Latino Short Fiction . . . . . . . . Latin American Short Fiction . . . Appendices More Latino Authors . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . Electronic Resources . . . . . . . . Chronological List of Authors . . . Indexes Genre Index . . . . . . . . . . . . Geographical Index . . . . . . . . Personages Index. . . . . . . . . . Title Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . l

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Piri Thomas Puerto Rican novelist Born: New York, New York; September 30, 1928 Also known as: Juan Pedro Tomás nonfiction: Down These Mean Streets, 1967; Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand, 1972; Seven Long Times, 1974. short fiction: Stories from El Barrio, 1978 (juvenile).

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iri Thomas (PIH-ree TAW-muhs) was born in 1928, just before the Great Depression struck, the first child of a Puerto Rican couple, Juan (also known as Johnny) and Dolores Montañez Tomás. In 1941, when Piri was thirteen, his father, whom he called “Poppa,” lost his job and went to work with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a Depression-era government jobs program. The work was hard manual labor, and Poppa became distant and cool toward his son, who desperately wanted paternal affection and approval. At an early age, Thomas became conscious of the problems of having dark skin. His own mother was light-skinned, and his brothers and sisters were light in color, with straight hair. Only the narrator and his father had the hair with tight curls and the dark brown skin that marked them as members of a disadvantaged race. The young narrator’s awareness of race increased when his family moved out of Harlem to an Italian neighborhood, where he was subjected to racial slurs and had to fight the Italian boys. Standing up to the Italians gradually won him acceptance, though, and he learned to make his way in the world by fighting. Thomas’s family returned to Harlem, where the boy became a member of a Puerto Rican youth gang. In 1944, the family moved to Long Island, enjoying the prosperity of Poppa’s wartime job. Thomas’s own stay in the suburbs did not last, though. The snubs of his schoolmates made him even more conscious of 659

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his color than he had been in the Italian neighborhood, and he dropped out of school and returned to Harlem. He became friends with Brew, a black man from the South, and Thomas’s puzzlement about his own racial identity led him to ask Brew to take him south. The two men went to Virginia, where they took work on a merchant ship. After his travels, Thomas returned to Harlem, where he fell in love with a young woman from Puerto Rico and who was waiting for him. He also, however, began to use heroin and developed a serious habit. After kicking his heroin habit with the help of a friend from his boyhood gang days and his friend’s mother, he took up another dangerous pursuit: armed robbery. Another Puerto Rican introduced him to two white men who had been in prison, and the four began robbing small businesses. A daring attempt to rob a nightclub full of patrons ended with Thomas shooting a policeman and being shot himself. Barely escaping death, he was sentenced to five to fifteen years at Sing Sing Prison. Soon transferred from Sing Sing to Comstock State Prison, Thomas remained behind bars from 1950 to 1956. His youth on the mean streets of New York served him well in prison, where only the strong and aggressive could avoid being raped and ex-

Zorro unleashed his imaginary whip, making the cracking sound he usually did when pleased. Zorro Jones had Zorro of the movies as his hero. Zorro, protector of the downtrodden poor, always left his mark Z with his sword on his enemy’s property or on his behind. Zorro Jones planned to do the same in El Barrio as he grew up. His brown-colored skin covered a lithe, muscular body that promised the world a giant. —from The Blue Wings and the Puerto Rican Knights

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ploited. In prison, he also began to think seriously about his life and to read widely. For a time, he explored the religious beliefs of the Black Muslims. Thomas finally won parole and found himself back in New York, ready to turn his life around. Down These Mean Streets is Thomas’s own story, and questions of identity and race lie at its core. Psychologically, it is the coming-of-age story of a young man who must struggle with the conflicts in his family and in his own mind in order to make sense of his life. Through gang involvement, drug addiction, a criminal career, and a prison sentence, the protagonist wrestles with his own versions of the problems that confront all people: problems of self-definition, of tension with parents, of sexual relationships, and of religious meaning. As a Puerto Rican, Thomas is a member of a group that has an ambiguous status. Puerto Rico is not a state or a part of any state, yet it is still part of the United States. Puerto Ricans are culturally different from the people of the mainland United States, but they are U.S. citizens. As a blend of national and racial ancestries, Puerto Ricans often do not fit neatly into the racial categories used by North Americans. Both of Thomas’s parents are from Puerto Rico, but Thomas grew up in New York; thus, there is a gap between him and his parents. To make matters even more complicated, Thomas and his father are dark-skinned, while Thomas’s mother and his brothers and sisters are lightskinned. This would not be a problem in Puerto Rico, where racial consciousness is less pronounced than in the mainland United States, but it proved to be a big problem for the young Piri. He continually felt “hung up between two sticks,” in his phrase. In his novel, there are continual hints that his father’s own discomfort about having dark skin is a source of the coldness the son feels from his father. Down These Mean Streets was both controversial and influential. It was criticized for its violence, explicit sexuality, and expression of strong racial feelings. During the 1970’s, the book was banned from the shelves of school libraries in a number of communities, including Queens in New York; Levittown, Long Island; Darien, Connecticut; and Salinas, California. Responding to these attempts at book banning, Thomas became an out662

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Down These Mean Streets Down These Mean Streets (1967) is an autobiographical novel that tells of the author’s experiences growing up as a dark-skinned Puerto Rican in New York, becoming involved in drugs and crime, and going to prison. The book’s thirty-five chapters are divided into eight sections, with each of the sections devoted to an important place and time in the author’s life. The first section, entitled “Harlem,” deals with Thomas’s childhood in and around New York’s Spanish Harlem. The second section, “Suburbia,” deal with life in the suburbs of Long Island, where the family moves after Thomas’s father gets a wartime job at an airplane factory. The third, fifth, and final chapters all concern Harlem, the site of the “mean streets” of the book’s title. Thomas is the narrator of the book, and the style draws heavily on the speech of New York’s Puerto Rican and black populations. Racism and prejudice, both as sociological forces and as sources of psychological pain, are central themes in the work. Some of Thomas’s difficulties in fitting in with American society are the result of poverty, but he also experiences real discrimination, and opportunities are closed to him because of his skin color. His anger and resentment at being continually rejected, though, are his true reasons for becoming a drug addict and a criminal. His story is ultimately the story of his ability to rise above his anger. Down These Mean Streets was the first work by a Puerto Rican author writing in English to attract a large readership. A best-seller when it appeared in 1967, it became an inspiration for the “Nuyorican” literary movement. The book was criticized for its violence, explicit sexuality, and expression of strong racial feelings, and was banned from the shelves of many school libraries in the 1970’s. In response, Thomas has become an outspoken opponent of all forms of censorship. — Carl L. Bankston III

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spoken opponent of all forms of censorship and an advocate for the poor and disenfranchised. As he says in the afterword to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Down These Mean Streets: In writing Down These Mean Streets, it was my hope that exposure of such conditions in the ghetto would have led to their improvement. But, thirty years later, the sad truth is that people caught in the ghettoes have not made much progress, have moved backwards in many respects—the social safety net is much weaker now. Unfortunately, it’s the same old Mean Streets, only worse. I was taught that justice wears a blindfold, so as not to be able to distinguish between the colors, and thus make everyone equal in the eyes of the law. I propose we remove the blindfold from the eyes of Lady Justice, so for the first time she can really see what’s happening and check out where the truth lies and the lies hide. That would be a start. Viva the children of all the colors! Punto! — Carl L. Bankston III

Learn More Fox, Geoffrey. Hispanic Nation: Culture, Politics, and the Constructing of Identity. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997. A general work on the growth of Hispanic ethnic groups in America. Contains a discussion of Puerto Rican literature that gives special attention to the influence of Piri Thomas. Hernandez, Carmen Dolores. Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers. New York: Praeger, 1997. Interviews with fourteen Puerto Rican authors, including Piri Thomas, who write in English. The book will help readers understand the dilemma of the Puerto Rican writer, who must work in two cultural traditions, and it presents readers with the views of Thomas and his fellow authors on their work. Holte, James Craig. The Conversion Experience in America: A Sourcebook on Religious Conversion Autobiography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992. Thomas, who described his religious experience in Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand, is included in this collection of essays about authors of religious conversion au664

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tobiographies. The essay about Thomas includes a short biography, a discussion of his book and the critical response it received, and a bibliography. Luis, William. Dance Between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature Written in the United States. 1997. Reprint. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001. Thomas is included in this analysis of prose and poetry written by Puerto Rican Americans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican Americans. Luis places these authors’ works in a broader social, political, historical, and racial context. Sandín, Lyn Di Ioria. Killing Spanish: Literary Essays on Ambivalent U.S. Latino/a Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Examines characters in Latino literature who are ambivalent about their American identities and their Caribbean and/or Latin American origins. Sandín looks at Down These Mean Streets by Thomas and novels by other authors in which poverty, race, and class force protagonists to embrace the street as their new home. Santiago, Roberto, ed. Boricuas: Influential Puerto Rican Writings— An Anthology. New York: Ballantine Books, 1995. An anthology of the most influential Puerto Rican writings of the twentieth century, both on the island and in the mainland United States. Intended to serve as a handbook on the Puerto Rican experience, this can help readers place the writings of Piri Thomas in literary and historical context. Turner, Faythe, ed. Puerto Rican Writers at Home in the USA: An Anthology. Seattle: Open Hand, 1991. A collection of stories, poems, and essays about the Puerto Rican experience in America, including writing by Piri Thomas. Thomas, Piri. “The World of Piri Thomas.” http://www .cheverote.com/. Accessed March 22, 2005. The author’s Web site contains considerable information about his life and works: a multi-page biography that includes links to the letters he wrote while in prison, links to his poems and excerpts from his prose pieces, and more.

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Rodolfo Usigli Mexican playwright Born: Mexico City, Mexico; November 17, 1905 Died: Mexico City, Mexico; June 18, 1979 drama: El niño y la niebla, wr. 1936, pr., pb. 1951; Medio tono, pr. 1937, pb. 1938 (The Great Middle Class, 1968); Estado de secreto, pr. 1938, pb. 1963; La mujer no hace milagros, pr. 1939, pb. 1949; La familia cena en casa, pr., pb. 1942; El gesticulador, pb. 1944, pr. 1947; Otra prima vera, pr. 1945, pb. 1947 (Another Springtime, 1961); Corona de sombra, pr., pb. 1947 (Crown of Shadows, 1946); Jano es una muchacha, pr., pb. 1952; Un día de éstos, pr. 1954, pb. 1957 (One of These Days, 1971); Corona de fuego, pr., pb. 1960; Corona de luz: La virgen, pr. 1963, pb. 1965 (Crown of Light, 1971). long fiction: Ensayo de un crimen, 1944. poetry: Conversación desesperada, 1938. nonfiction: México en el teatro, 1932 (Mexico in the Theater, 1976); Caminos del teatro en México, 1933; Itinerario del autor dramático, 1940; Anatomía del teatro, 1966.

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odolfo Usigli (rew-DOH-foh ew-SEE-lee) has been hailed as the father of Mexican theater. He introduced authentic dramatic representations of Mexico through works that addressed its history, its politics, and the psychological makeup of its people. The psychological factor is the core of his theater. Usigli was born in Mexico City, Mexico, on November 17, 1905, the product of Italian, Austrian, and Polish ancestry. Usigli demonstrated his interest in the theater at an early age. When he was eleven years old, he worked as an extra in the Castillo-Taboada troupe at Mexico’s Teatro Colón. He wished to study drama, but there were no established schools of drama in Mexico at that time. Therefore, he designed his own curriculum whereby he read and analyzed on a daily basis six plays by well-

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known dramatists. He then attended local performances, at which he compared the dramas he studied with the actual stage productions. His commentaries were published in Mexican newspapers. By the time he reached the age of twenty, he had become a respected theater critic. Usigli met with little success in finding producers for his first dramatic attempts. His difficulties with managers, producers, and critics may perhaps be traced to unhappy childhood experiences. Usigli was born with slightly crossed eyes, a person Spanish-speakers call bizco. His classmates punned on the word and nicknamed him Visconde (Viscount), which also alluded to his conviction of being superior to them. He later underwent corrective surgery for his eyes but never lost his conviction about his superiority, which often expressed itself in an arrogance and defensiveness that theater authorities found unappealing. From 1932 to 1934, Usigli offered courses in the history of the Mexican theater at the University of Mexico and served as director of the Teatro Radiofónico, which broadcast plays in conjunction with the Ministry of Education. During this period, he was also associated with the Teatro Orientación, which was created to introduce Mexico to the masterpieces of world theater, performing plays translated from French, Italian, English, German, and Russian. Usigli prepared the Spanish versions for the stage. In 1935, Usigli was awarded a scholarship to study dra-

He was courteous, but it is not known whether he was because he was Mexican or merely intelligent. Courtesy is the strength of the weak and the perfection of the strong. Or at least it was formerly. . . . He pretends not to attract attention and, naturally, attracts it. Accursed attention. —from Mexico in the Theater (trans. Wilder P. Scott)

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matic composition at Yale University. During this period, he wrote El gesticulador (the pretender), one of his greatest works. On his return to Mexico, he was appointed director of the school of drama and theater and director of the department of fine arts at the University of Mexico. In 1940, he founded his own theater, the Teatro Media Noche, to produce his Mexican plays, but ongoing problems with producers soon ended this venture. During the period from 1943 to 1946, Usigli served Mexico in a diplomatic capacity, becoming the cultural attaché at the Mexican embassy in Paris. During his tenure in Europe, he had the opportunity to meet his idol, playwright George Bernard Shaw. Also during this period, he completed another of his great works, Crown of Shadows, part of a trilogy about the three Mexican myths of sovereignty. (The other works in the trilogy are Corona de fuego—crown of fire—and Crown of Light.) After completing his tour of duty, Usigli returned to Mexico and of-

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fered courses at the University of Mexico in the history of the theater and playwriting. He completed The Corona Trilogy and several other plays. Usigli resumed his diplomatic career from 1956 until 1962, serving as Mexico’s ambassador to Lebanon and Norway. During this period and after his return to Mexico, he continued to produce dramatic works. In his plays, Usigli does not merely criticize the Mexican people and their society. Rather, he seeks to ennoble them by offering them models of their own potential greatness. Usigli accomplishes this by introducing the concept of myth formation. The concept of myth formation has its roots in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s conception of the historical process as a series of syntheses that revolve around transcendental historical figures such as Maximilian and Montezuma, who represent superior cultural symbols. From a cultural and theatrical perspective, a myth is a transcendental synthesis embodied in one of these figures that offers a new perspective, a positive direction for the country’s future growth. Its direct appeal to the faith of the Mexican audience causes them to reevaluate their mythical past and to experience a catharsis of nationality with those national sentiments and values that most ennoble it. In recognition of his efforts to create a Mexican national theater, Usigli was awarded the Premio Nacional de Letras in 1972. There are four elements that constantly recur in Usigli’s plays: fantasy, myth, family types, and humor. Fantasy is present in all of his works. Through examples that illustrate his philosophy, he sets the course that propels the action and motivates the characters: madness, absurdity, dreams, superstition, double identity, and illusions. The element of the fantastic is reinforced by dramatic techniques such as the play of lights, visions, flashbacks, and anonymous voices. Myth is of utmost importance in Usigli’s works. He sees Mexico as an outstanding example of a fusion of two cultures, the indigenous and the Hispanic, both of which are myth-oriented. Within the framework of Usigli’s Hegelian view of history, the central characters become transcendental myth figures. He uses myth to reinterpret historical 669

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The Great Middle Class In the sociological drama The Great Middle Class (1938) the Sierra family is transformed into a symbol of middle-class life. Each family member has a particular problem. The father has lost his job with the government because of his political affiliation and has taken refuge in pursuing other women, but the mother’s overwhelming religious character prevents her from seeing that anything is wrong. David, the eldest son and moderator of the family, suffers from tuberculosis. His brothers and sisters each have their own difficulties, but only David realizes that the only salvation is unity. An atmosphere of dissension, pessimism, confusion, and egotism prevails. However, the family members share a sense of unity that will surface during a grave crisis. At the end of the drama, the circumstances are much more serious than at the beginning. The father moves the family to another province, and he must sell much of the family furniture in order to pay the rent. The mother is able to acknowledge her family’s difficulties and suffers when she learns what her children have been through. The difference, however, lies in the sense of consolidation and unity among the members of the family and their attempts to rescue one another. They feel a new freedom in thought and action, born of the now-prevailing atmosphere of mutual love and respect. The Sierra family is a typical example of the trials and tribulations of any middle-class family anywhere in the world. Usigli, by presenting the life of the Sierra family in a universal light, successfully transcended national boundaries and won the empathy of other frontiers. Psychologically, Usigli appealed to a fundamental element of Mexican society: the clan instinct, the overpowering desire of family members to overcome their personal differences, no matter what the sacrifice or price, in order to ensure the continuation of their line. — Anne Laura Mattrella

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events, clarifying their significance and offering a new and positive direction for Mexico’s future. Another recurring element found in Usigli’s dramatic productions is the character types based on members of the family. He treats all social levels— lower, middle, upper, and aristocratic—to portray segments of Mexican society. Usigli’s acute awareness of the inconsistencies in Mexican life and culture are often expressed in witty dialogue and amusing episodes. The Great Middle Class, El gesticulador, and Crown of Shadows are considered to be Usigli’s finest works. Each portrays a conflict that tests the spirit. Human emotions are presented so as to diminish the distance between the public and the stage. Ridicule is not provoked from pathetic situations; rather, the audience feels a sense of spiritual elevation at the conclusion of each of these dramas. Usigli dedicated his life to the creation of a Mexican national theater. He combined practical experience, a keen sense of the Mexican spirit, a thorough knowledge of the theater, stylistic creativity, and a new ideology to establish the basis for a new Mexican theater. His dramas are neither didactic nor doctrinal, but objective in their thematic treatment. Usigli’s desire was to bring the past and the present into harmony, to see them in a positive light, and to appeal to the faith of the Mexican people to overcome their weaknesses and gain a new and optimistic perspective on their country’s future. Through his acting, translating, teaching, and writing, he played a decisive part in the creation of a Mexican national theater. — Anne Laura Mattrella Learn More Beardsell, Peter R. A Theatre for Cannibals: Rodolfo Usigli and the Mexican Stage. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992. A study of the dramatic works of Usigli and the Mexican theater of his times. Bibliography and index. Jones, Willis Knapp. Introduction to Two Plays: “Crown of Light,” “One of These Days,” by Rodolfo Usigli. Translated by Thomas Bledsoe. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. 671

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In his introduction to the translation of two of Usigli’s plays, Jones provides information on Usigli’s life and dramatic works. Savage, Ronald Vance. “Rodolfo Usigli’s Idea of Mexican Theatre.” Latin American Theatre Review 4, no. 2 (1971): 13-20. This essay examines the Mexican theater according to the viewpoint of Usigli. Tilles, Solomon H. “Rodolfo Usigli’s Concept of Dramatic Art.” Latin American Theatre Review 3, no. 2 (1970): 31-38. A discussion of drama as conceived by Usigli.

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Luis Miguel Valdez Mexican American playwright and political activist Born: Delano, California; June 26, 1940 drama: The Theft, pr. 1961; The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, pr. 1965, pb. 1967; Las dos caras del patroncito, pr. 1965, pb. 1971; La quinta temporada, pr. 1966, pb. 1971; Los vendidos, pr. 1967, pb. 1971; Dark Root of a Scream, pr. 1967, pb. 1973; La conquista de México, pr. 1968, pb. 1971 (puppet play); No saco nada de la escuela, pr. 1969, pb. 1971; The Militants, pr. 1969, pb. 1971; Vietnam campesino, pr. 1970, pb. 1971; Huelguistas, pr. 1970, pb. 1971; Bernabé, pr. 1970, pb. 1976; Soldado razo, pr., pb. 1971; Actos, pb. 1971 (includes Las dos caras del patroncito, La quinta temporada, Los vendidos, La conquista de México, No saco nada de la escuela, The Militants, Vietnam campesino, Huelguistas, and Soldado razo); Las pastorelas, pr. 1971 (adaptation of a sixteenth century Mexican shepherd’s play); La Vírgen del Tepeyac, pr. 1971 (adaptation of Las cuatro apariciones de la Vírgen de Guadalupe); Los endrogados, pr. 1972; Los olivos pits, pr. 1972; La gran carpa de los rasquachis, pr. 1973; Mundo, pr. 1973; El baille de los gigantes, pr. 1973; El fin del mundo, pr. 1975; Zoot Suit, pr. 1978, pb. 1992; Bandido!, pr. 1981, pb. 1992, revised pr. 1994; Corridos, pr. 1983; “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!,” pr., pb. 1986; Luis Valdez—Early Works: Actos, Bernabé, and Pensamiento Serpentino, pb. 1990; Zoot Suit, and Other Plays, pb. 1992; Mummified Deer, pr. 2000. screenplays: Zoot Suit, 1982 (adaptation of his play); La Bamba, 1987. teleplays: Fort Figueroa, 1988; La Pastorela, 1991; The Cisco Kid, 1994. edited text: Aztlán: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature, 1972 (with Stan Steiner). miscellaneous: Pensamiento Serpentino: A Chicano Approach to the Theatre of Reality, 1973. 673

Luis Miguel Valdez

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uis Miguel Valdez (lwees mih-GEHL VAL-dehz), political activist, playwright, director, essayist, and founder of El Teatro Campesino, is the most prominent figure in modern Chicano theater. Born on June 26, 1940, to migrant farmworker parents, he was second in a family of ten brothers and sisters. In spite of working in the fields from the age of six, Valdez completed high school and received a scholarship to San Jose State College, where he developed his early interest in theater. The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa was written while Valdez was a student there. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in English and drama in 1964, he joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe, whose work was based on commedia dell’arte and the theater of Bertolt Brecht. These experiences heavily influenced Valdez’s work, especially in terms of style and production. A 1965 meeting with César Chávez, who was organizing migrant farmworkers in Delano, California, led to the formation of El Teatro Campesino, the cultural and propagandistic arm of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union. Valdez created short improvisational pieces, called actos, for the troupe. All the actos are characterized by the use of masks, stereotyped characters, farcical exaggeration, and improvisation. Las dos caras del patroncito (the two faces of the boss) and La quinta temporada (the fifth season) are actos from this early period that highlight the plight of the farmworkers and the benefits of unionization.

“This ain’t your country. Look what’s happening all around you. The Japs have sewed up the Pacific. Rommel is kicking ass in Egypt but the Mayor of L.A. has declared all-out war on Chicanos. On you!” —from Zoot Suit Ignacio Gómez

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Arte Público Press

Valdez left the union in 1967, bringing El Teatro Campesino with him to establish El Centro Campesino Cultural. He wanted to broaden the concerns of the troupe by fostering Chicanos’ pride in their cultural heritage and by depicting their problems in the Anglo culture. Los vendidos (the sellouts), for example, satirizes Chicanos who attempt to assimilate into a white, racist society, and La conquista de México (the conquest of Mexico) links the fall of the Aztecs with the internal dissension of Chicano activists. In 1968 El Teatro Campesino moved toward producing full-length plays, starting with Valdez’s The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa. Expressionistic in style, the play explores the conflict between two brothers—an assimilationist and a pachuco, a swaggering street kid—and the impact this extremism has on the tenuous fabric of a Chicano family. Recognition followed, with an Obie Award in New York in 1969 for “creating a 675

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workers’ theater to demonstrate the politics of survival” and an invitation to perform at the Theatre des Nations festival in Nancy, France. Later in 1969, Valdez and the troupe moved to Fresno, California, where they founded an annual Chicano theater festival, and Valdez began teaching at Fresno State College. In 1971 Valdez moved his company permanently to the small town of San Juan Bautista in California. There, El Teatro Campesino underwent a fundamental transformation, as the group began increasingly to emphasize the spiritual side of their work, as derived from prevalent Christian as well as newfound Aztec and Mayan roots. This shift from an agitational focus to a search for spiritual solutions was met with anger by formerly admiring

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Zoot Suit The first Chicano play on Broadway, Zoot Suit (1992) grew out of California Chicano guerrilla theater, incorporating bilingual dialogue and ultimately alienating Mexican Americans. In it, Valdez questions the Los Angeles newspaper accounts of the Columbus Day “Zoot Suit” riots and the related Sleepy Lagoon murder trial (1942). The drama uses song, dance, and a unifying narrative based on the traditions of the Mexican corrido (a ballad form that often reflects on social issues). A zoot-suiter “master of ceremonies” called Pachuco narrates the action, dispelling illusion, showing reality, and providing flashbacks that characterize the protagonist, Henry Reyna, who is vilified in the white media, as heroic. This defiant, existential street actor wears the colors of Testatipoka, the Aztec god of education. Reyna, a loyal American about to ship out for the war in the Pacific, becomes a scapegoat for the Los Angeles police. When a minor scuffle with a rival gang interrupts his farewell celebration, he bravely steps in to break up a one-sided attack. Newsboys shouting inflammatory head-

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audiences in Mexico City at the Quinto Festival de los Teatros Chicanos in 1974. The company continued to flourish, however, touring campuses and communities yearly and giving financial support and advice to other theater troupes. Fame came with Zoot Suit, the first Chicano play to reach Broadway. Although its run was relatively brief, owing to negative criticism, the play was very popular on the West Coast and was made into a film in 1981, with Valdez both the director and the writer of the screenplay. During the 1980’s, Valdez and El Teatro Campesino continued to tour at home and abroad, presenting works by Valdez and collectively scripted pieces that interpret the Chicano experience. The 1986 comedy “I Don’t Have

lines and a lawyer predicting mass trials prepare viewers for legal farce. The prosecution twists testimony proving police misunderstandings and Henry’s heroism to win an unjust conviction. White liberals distort the conviction of the zoot-suiter “gang” for personal ends, and even Pachuco is ultimately overpowered and stripped by servicemen. The play ends as it began: with the war over, the incarcerated scapegoats released, and police persecution renewed. Leaving viewers with the choice of multiple possible endings, Valdez not only reflects the Mayan philosophy of multiple levels of existence but also offers alternate realities dependent on American willingness to accept or deny reality: a calm Henry and supportive family group united against false charges, Henry as victim of racist stereotypes reincarcerated and killed in a prison fight, Henry the born leader dying heroically in Korea and thereby winning a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor, Henry a father with several children, Henry merged with El Pachuco, a living myth and symbol of Chicano heritage and Chicano oppression. Thus, Reyna the individual portrays Chicanos in crisis in general. The plays shows Chicanos undermined by a prejudiced press, racist police, and an unjust legal system that distorts facts and denies Chicanos their rights. — Gina Macdonald

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to Show You No Stinking Badges!” is about the political and existential implications of acting, both in theater and in society. In 1987 Valdez wrote the screenplay for the successful film La Bamba, the story of Ritchie Valens, a young Chicano pop singer who died in an airplane crash in the late 1950’s. This work reached a large audience. After a gap in playwriting of almost fifteen years, Valdez wrote Mummified Deer. This play reaffirms his status as the “father of Chicano drama” and continues his exploration of his heritage through the juxtaposition of ritual and realism. The play takes its inspiration from a newspaper article concerning the discovery of a sixty-year-old fetus in the body of an eighty-fouryear old woman. According to scholar Jorge Huerta, the mummified fetus serves as a metaphor for “the Chicanos’ Indio heritage, seen through the lens of his own Yaqui blood.” The play’s major dramatic action operates in the historical/fictional past. Valdez’s contributions to contemporary Chicano theater are extensive. Writing individually and with others, he has redefined the cultural forms of the barrio: the acto, a short comic piece intended to move the audience to political action; the mito (myth), which characteristically takes the form of an allegory based on Indian ritual, in an attempt to integrate political activism and religious ritual; and the corrido, a reinvention of the musical based on Mexican American folk ballads. He has placed the Chicano experience onstage in all of its political and cultural complexity, creating what no other American playwright has, a genuine workers’ theater that has made serious drama popular, political drama entertaining, and ethnic drama universal. — Lori Hall Burghardt Learn More Broyles-Gonzales, Yolanda. El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Study drawing on previously unexamined materials, such as production notes and interviews with former ensemble members, to demystify the roles Valdez and El Teatro Campesino played in the development of a Chicano theater aesthetic. 678

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Conlogue, William. Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Refutes the stereotype that farmcentered works are pastoral. Examines work by Valdez and other writers to show how these works address migrant labor, gender roles, and other significant issues. Elam, Harry J., Jr. Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Explores the political, cultural, and performative similarities between El Teatro Campesino and Baraka’s Black Revolutionary Theater. An intriguing examination of the political theater of these two marginalized groups, Chicanos and African Americans, and their shared aesthetic. Huerta, Jorge A. Chicano Theatre: Themes and Forms. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press, 1982. Well-written and well-illustrated study that begins with Valdez’s experiences in Delano in 1965. It contains an excellent immediate description with dialogue of these first energies and is written in the present tense for immediacy and energy. Provides some discussion of the beginnings of the San Francisco mime troupe and strong description of the actos and their literary history in Europe. _______. “Labor Theatre, Street Theatre, and Community Theatre in the Barrio, 1965-1983.” In Hispanic Theatre in the United States, edited by Nicolás Kanellos. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1984. Placed at the end of a longer study of Hispanic theater, this essay takes on more importance by indicating Valdez’s contribution in a continuum of history. Good on contemporaries of El Teatro Campesino; strong bibliography. Kanellos, Nicolás. Mexican American Theater: Legacy and Reality. Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1987. Begins with an examination of Valdez’s transformation from director of El Teatro Campesino to the urban commercial playwright of Zoot Suit in 1978. Cites Valdez’s contribution to the “discernible period of proliferation and flourishing in Chicano theatres” from 1965 to 1976, then moves on to examine other offshoots of the impulse. 679

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Martinez, Manuel Luis. Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Martinez analyzes writings by Valdez and other Chicano nationalists whose works convey their opinions of participatory democracy and progressive culture. Valdez, Luis Miguel. “Zoot Suit and the Pachuco Phenomenon: An Interview with Luis Valdez.” Interview by Roberta OronaCordova. In Mexican American Theatre: Then and Now, edited by Nicolás Kanellos. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1983. The opening of the film version of Zoot Suit prompted this interview, in which Valdez reveals much about his motives for working, his view of Chicano literature and art, and his solutions to “the entrenched attitude” that will not allow Chicano participation in these industries.

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Luisa Valenzuela Argentine novelist and short-story writer Born: Buenos Aires, Argentina; November 26, 1938 long fiction: Hay que sonreír, 1966 (Clara, 1976); El gato eficaz, 1972; Como en la guerra, 1977 (He Who Searches, 1979); Libro que no muerde, 1980; Cola de lagartija, 1983 (The Lizard’s Tail, 1983); Novela Negra con Argentinos, 1990 (Black Novel with Argentines, 1992); Realidad nacional desde la cama, 1990 (Bedside Manners, 1995); La travesía, 2001. short fiction: Los heréticos, 1967 (The Heretics: Thirteen Short Stories, 1976); Aquí pasan cosas raras, 1975 (Strange Things Happen Here: Twenty-six Short Stories and a Novel, 1979); Cambio de armas, 1982 (Other Weapons, 1985); Donde viven las águilas, 1983 (Up Among the Eagles, 1988); Open Door: Stories, 1988; Simetrías, 1993 (Symmetries, 1998); Cuentos completos, y uno más, 1998. nonfiction: Peligrosas palabras, 2001 (essays).

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uisa Valenzuela (LWEE-sah vah-lehn-ZWAY-lah), Argentine novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and scriptwriter, is one of Argentina’s most significant authors to emerge since the boom in Latin American literature during the 1960’s. As the daughter of Luisa Mercedes Levinson, a prominent Argentine writer, Valenzuela was initiated at an early age into the world of the written word. Her father, Pablo Francisco Valenzuela, was a doctor. She was reared in Belgrano and received her early education from a German governess and an English tutor. In 1945, she attended Belgrano Girls’ School and then an English high school. She began writing for the magazine Quince abriles in 1953 and completed her studies at the National Preparatory School Vicente López in 1955. Subsequently she graduated with a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Buenos Aires. She wrote for the Buenos Aires magazines Atlántida, El hogar, and Esto es and worked with Jorge Luis Borges in the National Li681

Luisa Valenzuela

Courtesy of Sara Facio–Alicia D’Amico

brary of Argentina. She also wrote for the Belgrano Radio and was a tour guide in 1957. It was during this time that her first short stories were published, in the magazine Ficción. In 1958, when she was twenty years old, Valenzuela left Buenos Aires to become the Paris correspondent for the Argentine daily newspaper El Mundo. There she wrote programs for Radio Télévision Française and participated in the intellectual life of the then-famous Tel Quel group of literary theorists and structuralists. She married French merchant marine Theodore Marjak, resided in Normandy, and gave birth to a daughter, Anna-Lisa, in 1958. Three years later she returned to Buenos Aires and joined Argentina’s foremost newspaper, La Nación, where she became assistant editor. After she was divorced from her husband in 1965, she went to the University of Iowa’s Writers’ 682

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Workshop on a Fulbright grant in 1969. In 1972, she received a scholarship to study pop culture and literature in New York. She then became an avid traveler, living in Spain, Mexico, New York, and Buenos Aires; participating in conferences; continuing her journalism; and cultivating her fiction. Her first novel, Clara, presents the story of a naïve country girl turned prostitute in Buenos Aires; the girl’s picaresque adventures in a male world alternate between the humorous and the sinister. As the novel progresses, the antiheroine’s forthrightness slowly changes into a pathos under the constant attack of the city’s anonymity, alienation, and male brutality. Valenzuela won the Instituto Nacional de Cinematografía Award in 1973 for the script “Hay que sonreír,” based on her first novel. Her New York-Greenwich Village experience resulted in El gato eficaz (the efficient cat), an experimental novel sustained largely by the innovative use of language and an imaginative plot. In 1975, she returned to Buenos Aires and joined the staff of the journal Crisis. After participating in more workshops and conferences, she left Buenos Aires and settled in New York in 1978, where she conducted creative writing workshops and taught Latin American literature at Columbia University, as well as at other universities in the United States. Although she has lived much of her life outside Argentina, Valenzuela, like other Argentine women writers, could not escape her involvement with an Argentine society torn by vio-

They are two, I repeat: José María and María José, born of the same womb on the same morning, perhaps a bit mixed up. And the years went by for them, too, till they reached this point where a vast assortment of impossibilities began to weigh on them, over and above the desire to do as they wish. They can’t just go on: they’re stuck in the mud and out of gas. —from “Legend of the Self-Sufficient Child” (trans. Christopher Leland) 683

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lence, class struggle, dictatorship, and dehumanization. Thus, much of her fiction, though written and published outside her native country, where it was banned, treats such themes as violence, political repression, and cultural repression, especially as they relate to women. Yet, as critics point out, her work continually undermines social and political myths while (unlike that of

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“Other Weapons” Called by feminist critics a landmark in Latin American feminist literature, “Other Weapons” is a depiction of woman as wife-whore-slave in the extreme, for the female in the story is reduced to total passivity by torture at the hands of her male master. In an almost autistic state of isolation, her consciousness effaced, the woman feels completely isolated in time and space, cut off from the past, with no hope for a future. The story falls within a tradition of sadistic Bluebeard stories, stories in which a powerful male figure uses the woman as a sex object, keeping her shut off from the world and imprisoned within herself. The story is told in a fragmentary fashion, in third person but from the woman’s perspective, as she haltingly tries to “find herself out.” Complete with whips and voyeuristic peep holes where the man’s colleagues can watch the man sexually dominate the woman, “Other Weapons” is a paradigm of the sadistic male who uses the phallus as a weapon. The final revelation of the story comes when he tells her that she was a revolutionary who had been ordered to kill him but was caught just when she was aiming at him. He says everything he did was to save her, for he forced her to love him, to depend on him like a newborn baby. “I’ve got my weapons, too,” he repeats over and over. However, when he starts to leave, she remembers what the gun is for, lifts it and aims. — Charles E. May

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so many political writers) refusing to replace old mythic structures with new but equally arbitrary and authoritative ones. — Genevieve Slomski Learn More Kantaris, Elia Geoffrey. The Subversive Psyche: Contemporary Women’s Narrative from Argentina and Uruguay. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Examines Valenzuela’s fiction and literary theories to describe her treatment of sexuality. Kantaris argues that Valenzuela and other writers from Argentina and Uruguay often challenge Western theories of gender and identity. McNab, Pamela J. “Sexual Silence and Equine Imagery in Valenzuela and Cortázar.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 76 (April, 1999): 263-279. Compares how Valenzuela and Julio Cortázar use horse imagery to fill the gap between language and silence in their short stories. Medeiros-Lichem, María Teresa. Reading the Feminine Voice in Latin American Women’s Fiction: From Teresa de la Parra to Elena Poniatowska and Luisa Valenzuela. New York: P. Lang, 2002. A feminist critique of Valenzeula’s work. Niebylski, Dianna C. Humoring Resistance: Laughter and the Excessive Body in Latin American Women’s Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Analyzes how Valenzuela and other Latin American women writers use humor and other literary techniques to approach questions of identity and community. Shaw, Donald L. The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Shaw includes a chapter about Valenzuela in his examination of Latin American fiction that first appeared in the mid-1970’s. This literature differed from the works published in the preceding “Boom” period: it was more reader friendly, situated in the here and now, and not readily assimilated into the postmodern movement. Tomlinson, Emily. “Rewriting Fictions of Power: The Texts of Luisa Valenzuela and Marta Traba.” Modern Language Review 93 (July, 1998): 695-709. Discusses the feminist exploration of themes of power in the writings of the two authors. 685

César Vallejo Peruvian poet Born: Santiago de Chuco, Peru; March 16, 1892 Died: Paris, France; April 15, 1938 poetry: Los heraldos negros, 1918 (The Black Heralds, 1990); Trilce, 1922 (English translation, 1973); Poemas en prosa, 1939 (Prose Poems, 1978); Poemas humanos, 1939 (Human Poems, 1968); España, aparta de mí este cáliz, 1939 (Spain, Take This Cup from Me, 1974); Obra poética completa, 1968; Poesía completa, 1978; César Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry, 1978; Selected Poems, 1981. long fiction: Fábula salvaje, 1923 (novella); El tungsteno, 1931 (Tungsten, 1988). short fiction: Escalas melografiadas, 1923; Hacia el reino de los Sciris, 1967; Paco Yunque, 1969. drama: La piedra cansada, pb. 1979; Colacho hermanos: O, Presidentes de América, pb. 1979; Lock-Out, pb. 1979; Entre las dos orillas corre el río, pb. 1979; Teatro completo, pb. 1979. nonfiction: Rusia en 1931: Reflexiones al pie del Kremlin, 1931, 1965; El romanticismo en la poesía castellana, 1954; Rusia ante el segundo plan quinquenal, 1965; El arte y la revolución, 1973; Contra el secreto profesional, 1973.

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ésar Vallejo (SAY-zahr vah-YAY-hoh) vies with the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda for recognition as the best Spanish American poet of the twentieth century, yet the semantic difficulty of his poetry has often meant that he is not as well known outside the Spanish-speaking world as he deserves to be. Author of a novel, a novella, four dramas, a collection of short stories, a collection of essays on Marxism and literary theory, two books on Soviet Russia, and more than two hundred newspaper articles, Vallejo is mainly remembered for his poetry. Born the eleventh child to a family of mixed Spanish and Indian origins, Vallejo as a child witnessed at first hand hunger,

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poverty, and the injustices done to Indians. His first book of poems, The Black Heralds, showed him still to be under the influence of Modernismo—which favored allusions to Greco-Roman mythology—but also hinted at the emergence of a radically new personal poetic voice. The major theme of this collection was anguish at the injustice and futility of life, a feeling that was deepened by the death of his older brother, Miguel. Some poems in The Black Heralds openly question God’s role in the universe, some demonstrate the stirrings of an Amerindian consciousness, and others hint at the growth of social concern for the plight of the Indians. In 1920, Vallejo’s involvement in political matters concerning the Indian population led to his imprisonment for nearly three months. This experience heightened his feeling of loss at the death of his mother and contributed to a state of depression that was to torment him for the rest of his life. Trilce was conceived during his imprisonment; in this work, Vallejo used startling and innovative techniques—such as neologisms, colloquialisms, and typographical innovation—to express his anguish at the disparity that he felt existed between human aspirations and the limitations of human existence. In 1923, Vallejo left Peru for Europe; he was never to return to his homeland. While in Paris, he was unable to find stable employment; he barely made a living from translations, language tutoring, and political writing. His experience of poverty was ac-

A cripple walks by arm in arm with a child After that I’m going to read André Breton? Another shakes from cold, hacks, spits blood. Is it possible to even mention the profound I? Another searches in the mud for bones, rinds. How write after that about the infinite? —from “A man walks by with a loaf of bread on his shoulder” (trans. Clayton Eshleman)

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companied by a growing interest in Marxism. In the late 1920’s, Vallejo became a frequent visitor to the bookstore of L’Humanité, the Communist newspaper. He read Marxist and Leninist theory, and as a result, his work reflected this shift toward the political sphere. He also traveled twice to the Soviet Union during these years to see Communism at work firsthand. Vallejo was

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Spain, Take This Cup from Me Although first published as part of Human Poems (1968), Vallejo’s Spain, Take This Cup from Me actually forms a separate, unified work very different in tone from the majority of the other posthumous poems—a tone of hope, although, especially in the title poem, the poet seems to suspect that the cause he has believed in so passionately may be lost. In this poem, perhaps the last that Vallejo wrote, the orphan—now all human children—has found a mother. This mother is Spain, symbol of a new revolutionary order in which oppression may be ended. The children are urged not to let their mother die; nevertheless, even should this happen, they have a recourse: to continue struggling and to find a new mother. In Human Poems, man is captive of his body and hardly more intelligent than the lower animals, but in Spain, Take This Cup from Me he is capable of true transcendence through solidarity and the will to fight injustice. Spain thus becomes a text—a book that sprouts from the body of an anonymous soldier. The poet insists that he himself is nothing, and that his actions rather than his words constitute the real text. This may represent a greatly evolved negation of poetic authority, first seen in “The Black Heralds” with the repeated cry, “I don’t know!” Nevertheless, Spain, Take This Cup from Me rings with a biblical tone, and the poet sometimes sounds like a prophet. — Lee Hunt Dowling

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expelled from France in 1930 for his political activities (he had to go to Spain), and he joined the Communist Party in 1931. While he published no new poetic works during the 1930’s, he continued to write poetry based on his experience of life in Europe. About half of these poems, which were published posthumously under the title Human Poems, focus on the collective experience of humankind. A number of the poems express enthusiasm for the collective ethos of communism, some express dismay at the exploitation and pain experienced by the proletariat, and others express disillusionment with politics and politicians. In July, 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and Vallejo was irresistibly drawn to this international political struggle. He traveled to Spain on two separate occasions and wrote some emotional poems about the conflict, subsequently collected in 689

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Spain, Take This Cup from Me. Some of the best poems of this collection focus on a Republican war hero. “Masa” (Mass), for example, perhaps Vallejo’s most famous poem, focuses on a moment on the battlefield when a dead Republican militiaman is miraculously brought back to life through the collective love of humankind. Vallejo died on Good Friday in 1938, muttering that he wanted to go to Spain, on the very day that Francisco Franco’s troops split the Republican forces in two by reaching the Mediterranean Sea, thereby sealing the fate of the Republicans. Vallejo thus did not live to see the demise of the Republican forces he supported. A number of poems were discovered among his posthumous papers by his widow, Georgette de Vallejo, who the following year published them under the title Human Poems. They had been written from the late 1920’s to the mid-1930’s and had been typed up over a period of about six months preceding Vallejo’s death. — Stephen M. Hart Learn More Dove, Patrick. The Catastrophe of Modernity: Tragedy and the Nation in Latin American Literature. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2004. Dove analyzes Trilce and works by other authors to determine how literature reflects and comes to terms with societal catastrophe in Latin America. Franco, Jean. César Vallejo: The Dialectics of Poetry and Silence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976. A good introduction to Vallejo’s work. Hart, Stephen. César Vallejo: A Critical Bibliography of Research. London: Tamesis, 2002. Describes and evaluates the manuscripts, books, essays, articles, translations, and theses that have been written about Vallejo since his death. _______, ed. César Vallejo: Selected Poems. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2000. Hart’s introduction and notes on Vallejo include excerpts of poetry in Spanish. (The text is in English.) Also includes a bibliography and glossary. Hedrick, Tace. Mestizo Modernism: Race, Nation, and Identity in Latin American Culture, 1900-1940. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rut690

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gers University Press, 2003. Hedrick argues that Modernism had a different meaning for Latin American writers and artists than it did for Americans and Europeans. He examines what being “modern” and “American” meant to Vallejo, Gabriel Mistral, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera. Higgins, James. The Poet in Peru: Alienation and the Quest for a Super-Reality. Liverpool, England: Cairns, 1982. Contains a good overview of the main themes of Vallejo’s poetry. McGuirk, Bernard. Latin American Literature: Symptons, Risks, and Strategies of Poststructuralist Criticism. New York: Routledge, 1997. An analysis of Latin American literature from 18901990, including the work of Vallejo. McGuirk examines the confrontation between theory, politics, and culture that is present in literature of this period. Weiss, Jason. The Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Writers in Paris. New York: Routledge, 2003. Weiss explores the lives and work of Vallejo and other twentieth century Latin American writers who lived in Paris. He describes what their experiences in Paris meant to them and how it affected their writing.

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Mario Vargas Llosa Peruvian novelist Born: Arequipa, Peru; March 28, 1936 Also known as: Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa long fiction: La ciudad y los perros, 1962 (The Time of the Hero, 1966); La casa verde, 1965 (The Green House, 1968); Los cachorros, 1967 (novella; The Cubs, 1979); Conversación en la catedral, 1969 (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975); Pantaleón y las visitadoras, 1973 (Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978); La tía Julia y el escribidor, 1977 (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982); La guerra del fin del mundo, 1981 (The War of the End of the World, 1984); La historia de Alejandro Mayta, 1984 (The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, 1986); ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, 1987 (Who Killed Palomino Molero?, 1987); El hablador, 1987 (The Storyteller, 1989); Elogio de la madrastra, 1988 (In Praise of the Stepmother, 1990); Lituma en los Andes, 1993 (Death in the Andes, 1996); Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, 1997 (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, 1998); Fiesta del Chivo, 2000 (The Feast of the Goat, 2001); El paraíso en la otra esquina, 2003 (The Way to Paradise, 2003). short fiction: Los jefes, 1959 (The Cubs, and Other Stories, 1979). drama: La señorita de Tacna, pb. 1981 (The Young Lady from Tacna, 1990); Kathie y el hipopótamo, pb. 1983 (Kathie and the Hippopotamus, 1990); La Chunga, pb. 1987 (English translation, 1990); Three Plays, pb. 1990; El loco de los balcones, pb. 1993. nonfiction: La novela en América Latina: Dialogo, 1968; Literatura en la revolución y revolución en la literatura, 1970 (with Julio Cortázar and Oscar Collazos); La historia secreta de una novela, 1971; Gabriel García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio, 1971; El combate imaginario, 1972; García Márquez y la problemática de la novela, 1973; La novela y el problema de la expresión literaria 692

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en Peru, 1974; La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y “Madame Bovary,” 1975 (The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and “Madame Bovary,” 1986); José María Arguedas: Entre sapos y halcones, 1978; La utopia arcaica, 1978; Entre Sartre y Camus, 1981; Contra viento y marea, 1964-1988, 1983-1990 (3 volumes); A Writer’s Reality, 1991 (Myron I. Lichtblau, editor); Fiction: The Power of Lies, 1993; Pez en el agua, 1993 (A Fish in the Water: A Memoir, 1994); Making Waves, 1996; Cartas a un joven novelista, 1997 (Letters to a Young Novelist, 2002); Claudio Bravo: Paintings and Drawings, 1997 (with Paul Bowles); El lenguaje de la pasión, 2001 (The Language of Passion: Selected Commentary, 2003); La verdad de las mentiras, 2002.

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eru’s leading contemporary novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa (MAH-ree-oh VAHR-gahs YOH-sah), is regarded as one of the creators (along with such writers as Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes) of the new Latin American novel. The son of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta, Mario Vargas Llosa was born in the town of Arequipa in southern Peru. His parents were divorced before he was born, and he was taken by his mother to live at Cochabama, Bolivia, with her parents, who spoiled him. When he was nine, he and his mother left for Piura, in northwestern Peru; however, a year later, his parents remarried, and they moved the family to Lima.

Those ingrates wanted women and nighttime fun so much that finally heaven (“the devil, you mean, that cursed trickster,” Father García says) ended up giving them exactly what they wanted. And that was how it came to be, noisy, frivolous, and nocturnal: the Green House. —from The Green House (trans. Gregory Rabassa)

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The pampered and sensitive boy found himself no longer the center of attention. At the Catholic school he attended in Lima, he was younger than most of his classmates and was consequently ridiculed. At home, his artistic activities had to be kept from his father, who (like many Peruvians) regarded writing as no work for a man. For Vargas Llosa, literature became an escape and, as he later described it, a way of justifying his existence. Intending to “make a man of him,” Vargas Llosa’s father sent his son to a military academy in Lima, the Leoncio Prado. The machismo and brutality he encountered there proved highly traumatic for the young man. This experience ended in 1952, when Vargas Llosa returned to Piura for his final year of secondary school. In Piura he worked part-time on the newspaper La Industria and wrote a play called “La huida” (the escape). Returning to Lima, Vargas Llosa studied for his degree in literature at the University of San Marcos, while being employed as a journalist with Radio Panamericana and the newspaper La Crónica. In 1955 he married Julia Urquidi, a Bolivian; the marriage ended in divorce. In 1965 he married his first cousin Patricia Llosa, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. Vargas Llosa made a brief visit to Paris in 1958 and won a prize in a short-story competition sponsored by La Revue française. The winning story, “El desafío” (the challenge), was published in his first book of short stories. The book won for Vargas Llosa the Premio Leopoldo Alas award in Spain, where it was published in 1959. That same year the author traveled to the University of Madrid on a scholarship but decided to move on to Paris without completing his doctoral dissertation. He lived there for seven years, working as a Berlitz teacher, as a journalist, and with URTF, the French radio and television network. In Paris, Vargas Llosa met other Latin American and French writers and intellectuals but worked and wrote in relative isolation until the publication of his first novel, The Time of the Hero, which caused a sensation throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Highly experimental in style, the novel portrays an educational institution that deliberately corrupts innocence and 695

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The Time of the Hero The Time of the Hero (1962) is set at a military academy and explores the relationships among a group of cadets as they enter adulthood. The various hierarchies under which the cadets live structure the plot, which works itself out through multiple narrators. The story concentrates upon what the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre termed the time of election, when one becomes the self one has chosen to be. Vargas Llosa explores this moment, not only for the adolescents but also for their officers and for Peru’s power structure. By stressing the limited options available to the cadets and by revealing the hideous strength of the social hierarchies into which they must blend, he creates a narrative web of tragic intensity. The cadets are from varying social strata, providing the perfect mechanism for portraying the country’s social structure. They form a small cell (the “Circle”) to ensure their survival. Through a series of mistakes, the cell is implicated in the death of a cadet. The guilt associated with the cadet’s murder spreads through the school, and its moral implications are realized most clearly in the reactions of three characters: Gamboa, the perfect officer; Alberto, the author of pornographic novels and the typical bourgeois; and the Jaguar, the invincible strong man who created the Circle. Each of them comes to terms with the reality of death and is indelibly marked: Gamboa’s career is ruined because he disputes his superior officers’ decisions; Alberto returns to the suburb instead of becoming the writer he should have been; and the Jaguar escapes through his love for another, but his life is constantly threatened by corruption. The fragmented conversations, the disjointed interior monologues, the tension between adolescent and adult realities—all of these aspects create a dramatic field upon which the battles for honor are lost. — Mary E. Davis

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perverts idealism in its students (indicting both the Leoncio Prado and the Peruvian military regime that it represents). The Peruvian military authorities burned a thousand copies of the book on the grounds of the Leoncio Prado and dismissed the work as the product of a demented Communist mind. In Spain, however, it received the Premio de la Crítica Española, and it has been translated into more than a dozen languages. The Green House appeared three years later. The title refers both to a Piura brothel and to the rain forest. The social messages—the complicity between army and church, the horrors of human exploitation—coexist with the intense inner conflicts of the characters. Some critics disparaged the novel’s characters as one-dimensional, failing to understand that for Vargas Llosa a novel is primarily a chronicle of action, not an inner revelation of the forces that motivate action. The book was awarded numerous prizes in Spain and Peru. In 1966 Vargas Llosa left Paris for London, accepting an appointment as visiting lecturer in Latin American literature at the University of London; he also traveled and lectured throughout Great Britain and Europe. He then spent a semester as writer-in-residence at the University of Washington in Seattle. After the publication of his third novel, Conversation in the Cathedral, a monumental two-volume indictment of Peruvian life under the corrupt dictatorship of Manuel Udria (he ruled from 1948 to 1956), Vargas Llosa lectured briefly at the University of Puerto Rico. The doctoral dissertation he had begun in 1959, a study of the fiction of his close friend Gabriel García Márquez, was finally published in 1971. Two years later a fourth novel appeared: Captain Pantoja and the Special Service. While it once again attacked the unholy alliance of church, army, and brothel, it was written in a new farcical style. This comic vein continues in the author’s next novel, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, a satirical account of the discovery of a Bolivian genius in his genre: radio melodramas. Besides being a writer of fiction, Vargas Llosa has published much literary criticism. For him, writing literary criticism is a 697

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creative act, not unlike that of writing a novel or a short story, in which the critic indulges in the same arbitrariness and fantasy as the author. Finally, Vargas Llosa has taken an active role in Peruvian politics, running for president in 1990. As a spokesman for democratic centrism, he has been harshly criticized by his erstwhile colleagues on the left. Not only in speeches and journalistic pieces but also in novels such as The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta and The Feast of the Goat, Vargas Llosa has cast a skeptical eye on revolutionary ideology and its real-world outcomes. Political controversy, however, has not diminished his reputation as one of the leading writers in Latin America. — Genevieve Slomski Learn More Booker, M. Keith. Vargas Llosa Among the Postmodernists. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. One of the most comprehensive treatments of Vargas Llosa’s work. Includes chapters such as “The Reader as Voyeur” and “Literature and Modification.” Castro-Klaren, Sara. Understanding Mario Vargas Llosa. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Offers an insightful analysis of Vargas Llosa’s major works of fiction and views the works in their political and cultural context. Gerdes, Dick. Mario Vargas Llosa. Boston: Twayne, 1985. A varied and useful collection of critical essays by Gerdes; includes a chronology of events and a bibliography. Guillermoprieto, Alma. Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America. New York: Pantheon, 2001. Discusses Vargas Llosa’s political career. Köllmann, Sabine. Vargas Llosa’s Fiction and the Demons of Politics. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Evaluates the relationship of Vargas Llosa’s fiction to his political writing, focusing on three political novels. Köllmann concludes that politics is a demon for Vargas Llosa, provoking him to creativity. Kristal, Efraín. Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. Kristal examines the overarching reasons for Vargas Llosa’s 698

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political passions and divides Vargas Llosa’s writing career into sections corresponding to results of his ideas on capitalism and the decline of the Cuban Revolution. Moses, Michael Valdez. The Novel and the Globalization of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Discusses the cultural context of Vargas Llosa’s major works of fiction. Vargas Llosa, Mario. “Mario Vargas Llosa.” http://www .mvargasllosa.com/. Accessed March 22, 2005. The author’s Web site contains basic information about life, his books, awards he has received, and a detailed chronology.

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Maruxa Vilalta Spanish-born Mexican playwright Born: Barcelona, Spain; September 23, 1932 drama: Los desorientados, pb. 1959, pr. 1960 (adaptation of her novel); Trio, pr. 1964, pb. 1965 (includes Un país feliz, Soliloquio del tiempo, and La última letra); El 9, pr. 1965, pb. 1966 (Number 9, 1973); Cuestión de narices, pr. 1966, pb. 1967; Esta noche juntos, amándonos tanto, pr., pb. 1970 (Together Tonight, Loving Each Other So Much, 1973); Nada como el piso 16, pr. 1975, pb. 1977 (Nothing Like the Sixteenth Floor, 1978); Historia de Él, pr. 1978, pb. 1979 (The Story of Him, 1980); Una mujer, dos hombres, y un balazo, pr. 1981, pb. 1984 (A Woman, Two Men, and a Gunshot, 1984); Pequeña historia de horror (y de amor desenfrenado), pb. 1984, pr. 1985 (A Little Tale of Horror [and Unbridled Love], 1986); Una voz en el desierto: Vida de San Jerónimo, pb. 1990, pr. 1991 (A Voice in the Wilderness: The Life of Saint Jerome, 1990); Francisco de Asís, pr. 1992, pb. 1993 (Francis of Assisi, 1993); Jesucristo entre nosotros, pr. 1994, pb. 1995; El barco obrio, pb. 1995; En blanco y negro: Ignacio y los jesuitas, pr., pb. 1997; 1910, pr. 2000, pb. 2001. long fiction: El castigo, 1957; Los desorientados, 1958; Dos colores para el paisaje, 1961. short fiction: El otro día, la muerte, 1974.

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aruxa Vilalta (mah-REW-shah vee-LAHL-tah) was born in Barcelona, Spain, on September 23, 1932. Her family, exiles from the Spanish Civil War, emigrated in 1939 to Mexico, where Vilalta continued to reside. After completing her primary and secondary education at the Liceo Franco Mexicano in Mexico City, Vilalta studied Spanish literature at the college of philosophy and letters of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She was married in 1951 and has two children. 700

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Vilalta began her writing career as a novelist in 1957, with El castigo (the punishment). When, in 1959, she adapted her second published novel, Los desorientados (the disoriented ones), for the stage, Vilalta was so impressed by the immediacy of the theatrical medium and the concrete life it gave to her characters that she dedicated herself thereafter almost exclusively to playwriting. While her early plays, especially Number 9, won for her considerable critical attention, it was in 1970, with Together Tonight, Loving Each Other So Much, that she really established herself as one of Mexico’s leading experimental dramatists. This was the first of three plays that would win for her the coveted Alarcón Prize for the best play of the year; in 1978, The Story of Him won that prize on a unanimous vote, something rather rare in the award’s history. In 1975, with the prizewinning Nothing Like the Sixteenth Floor, Vilalta began directing her own plays, and as a director, she has been closely associated with the National Autonomous University of Mexico, which is considered the major locus for experimental play production in Mexico. Vilalta is also a noted essayist and theater critic for Mexico’s leading daily newspaper, Excelsior. Vilalta is known at home and abroad as an experimentalist, a playwright who with every new work further explores the possibilities of the theatrical medium. Her plays have been showcases for significant theatrical innovations since the mid-twentieth

“Let’s not be pessimists. Let’s try to have constructive thoughts. Thoughts that are educative, productive, depurative, communicative, seductive, sensitive, digestive, abortive, cohesive, copulative, operative, ponderative, lucrative and lubricative, imperative, volitive, incentive, and incisive. In any case, thoughts to live with.” —from Number 9 (trans. W. Keith Leonard and Mario T. Soria) 701

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century, and they have been associated with names such as Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Bertolt Brecht. Vilalta has been concerned with the most pressing issues of the twentieth century, such as the loss of direction in a seemingly absurd world, humankind’s horrifying capacity for cruelty, and the corrupting allure of power. Given these concerns, it is not surprising that Vilalta’s plays are themselves often violent and shocking and that her characters are dehumanized grotesques. Vilalta’s playwriting fits within a universalist trend in Latin American theater, and for this reason, her plays are not peculiarly Mexican, either in their language, their characters, or their setting. This goes hand in hand with Vilalta’s rejection of more realistic stage conventions, which she considers too much associated with a local theater of customs or manners, what in Spanish is called costumbrismo. Instead, Vilalta usually prefers a nonrepresentational theater, whose characters belong to no specific country. When she does place them geographically, as in Nothing Like the Sixteenth Floor, it is in Manhattan, New York, and not in Mexico City. Vilalta’s conscious effort to avoid things typically Mexican clearly places her on one side of a long-standing debate among fellow playwrights about how indigenous their art should be and the degree to which it should be valued based on international appeal. A similar debate has been waged by artists in most Latin American countries, who recognize the necessity to deal with their own reality but also do not want to be potentially isolated from world audiences. Many have chosen the same solution as Vilalta, which is to write plays that can be read as allegories. Thus, while on one level they may not have anything overtly Mexican about them, the issues with which they deal—the dehumanization of the labor force, the cruelty individuals inflict on one another, the institutionalization of violence—most certainly do. It is by indirection, then, that Vilalta makes a powerful commentary on the specific world in which she lives, while not actually having to place her characters there. Vilalta often expresses her thematic concerns through the theatrical metaphor of game playing. Usually she keeps the 702

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1910 Vilalta’s play 1910 (2001) won critical acclaim. The epic dramatizes the commoners’ experience of the Mexican Revolution. As playwright and director, Vilalta intended to demonstrate how theater was the perfect medium for the Mexican Revolution, which played out as the history of passions. Vilalta’s 168 characters portray anonymous townspeople and farmers, not famous military or governmental figures. She intended to demythicize the revolution. Rather than political heroics or the official story of history, 1910 portrays child soldiers, women guerrilleras fighting among the men, violence inflicted by the campesinos on themselves, and thoughtless yet pure acts of heroism. Vilalta’s Mexico reveals the realities of all wars. Like most of Vilalta’s plays, 1910 exposes sociopolitical problems that extend beyond Mexico. She denounces governments that practice dictatorial abuses behind a facade of democracy while they dehumanize their citizens. Power in interpersonal relations is examined in all its facets and degrees, from the abuser to the abused. — Kirsten F. Nigro

number of players at two or three, and the intensity of the games may well explain her preference for one-act plays. The rules for the games her characters play are not always easy to follow, because they do not necessarily adhere to everyday logic. Their logic resides in the games themselves, which should be interpreted as metaphors and not concrete depictions of reality offstage. Vilalta represents a considerable presence in Mexican experimental drama, and her plays show the clear influence of many major theater innovators of the twentieth century. Vilalta is not merely derivative, however, for she adapts these influences to 703

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her own ends. The result is a very personal theater, one that is not particularly Mexican in any obvious way but that still manages to make an indirect commentary on the social and political realities of Mexican culture. Moreover, although the vision of humankind that Vilalta paints is bleak in the extreme, critical and audience enthusiasm for her plays, both in Mexico and abroad, would seem to indicate playgoers’ recognition that, by emphasizing the negative, Vilalta ultimately hopes to provoke change for the better. Vilalta’s work, like much experimental theater since the 1960’s, means to assault rather than comfort audiences, and has a definite political intent while not being allied with any specific ideology. Instead, it makes a statement with a broad application, regardless of geography or culture. As a result, Vilalta has won audiences throughout Latin America, in the United States, Canada, and numerous European countries. In Mexico itself, Vilalta has three times received that country’s most prestigious drama award, the Alarcón Prize of the Mexican Critics Association— for Together Tonight, Loving Each Other So Much, Nothing Like the Sixteenth Floor, and The Story of Him. Number 9 was selected for publication in the United States as one of the best short plays of 1973. Vilalta’s major plays have been published in English as well as in French, Italian, Catalan, and Czech. Vilalta won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz award for best play in 1976 for Nothing Like the Sixteenth Floor. That same year, she was awarded the El Fígaro award for best play for The Story of Him. In 1991, she received the award for best play for A Voice in the Wilderness: The Life of Saint Jerome from the Agrupación de Periodistas Teatrales. The drama also won the Claridades award for best play of the year. The Asociación Mexicana de Críticos de Teatro gave the drama Francis of Assisi its award for the best creative research. — Kirsten F. Nigro Learn More Bearse, Grace, and Lorraine E. Roses. “Maruxa Vilalta: Social Dramatist.” Revista de estudios hispánicos 43 (October, 1984): 399-406. An analysis of Vilalta’s role as a social dramatist. 704

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Cajiao Salas, Teresa, and Margarita Vargas, eds. Women Writing Women: An Anthology of Spanish American Theater of the 1980’s. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. The authors analyze Vilalta’s dramaturgy and provide detailed bibliographical information. They include an English translation by Kirsten F. Nigro of A Woman, Two Men, and a Gunshot. Gladhart, Amalia. The Leper in Blue: Coercive Performance and the Contemporary Latin American Theater. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. This study explores contemporary controversial playwrights with social and political messages. Gladhart examines several of Vilalta’s plays. Magnarelli, Sharon. “Maruxa Vilalta: Una voz en el desierto.” In Latin American Women Dramatists: Theater, Texts, and Theories, edited by Catherine Larson and Margarita Vargas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Vilalta is one of the fifteen playwrights included in this collection of critical essays examining their lives and work. Magnarelli’s essay focuses on Una voz en el desierto: vida del San Jeronimo, discussing the relation to performance and art in the two plays. “Maruxa Vilalta.” In Dictionary of Mexican Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. A concise biographical treatment of Vilalta.

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José Antonio Villarreal Mexican American novelist Born: Los Angeles, California; July 30, 1924 long fiction: Pocho, 1959; The Fifth Horseman, 1974; Clemente Chacón, 1984. short fiction: “The Last Minstrel in California” and “The Laughter of My Father” (in Iguana Dreams, 1992).

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he parents of José Antonio Villarreal (hoh-SAY ahn-TOHnyoh VEE-yah-ree-AHL) were born in Mexico and moved to the United States in 1921. His father fought for Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution. Villarreal’s family served as migrant workers in the fields of California before settling in Santa Clara in 1930. As a child he read such works as classical mythology, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). He has cited James Otis’s Toby Tyler: Or, Ten Weeks with a Circus (1881) as his favorite childhood book. Villarreal received a B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. He has taught at various universities, including the University of Colorado, the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of Texas-Pan American, the University of Santa Clara, and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Villarreal has the distinction of having written what is considered to be the first Chicano novel, Pocho, published in 1959, before the Civil Rights movement began in earnest. Villarreal maintains his individuality within the Chicano movement; he acknowledges his cultural debt not only to the Chicano culture but to the mainstream cultures of the United States and Mexico as well. He considers Chicano literature to be a part of American literature and compares Chicano writers to the regional writers of the southern or western United States. He acknowledges 706

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Mexican literature as an influence on his writing but feels that, except for the difference of language, the literatures of Mexico and the United States are very similar. Villarreal considers the best Chicano literature to be that which informs the rest of American society about the condition of Hispanics living in the United States. He does not hesitate to criticize radical propagandistic writings by Chicanos which, in his opinion, alienate the general public and are read only by Chicanos, who are already familiar with their predicament. Villarreal has gone as far as to say that Chicano literature has come to be considered a separate and distinct body of literature largely because of the promotional efforts of academics who must justify their jobs and graduate programs. Villarreal’s first novel, Pocho, suggests that the Mexican Revolution was the beginning of the proliferation of Hispanic communities in the American Southwest. Subsequently, many other Chicano novelists have also referred to the revolution as the point of departure for Chicano culture. The novel’s title is a derogatory term for an Americanized Chicano. The father of the protagonist, Richard Rubio, had participated in the Mexican Revolution and then crossed into the United States. As he matures, Richard rejects his parents’ Mexican Catholic values in order to assimilate into American society. As he witnesses a demonstration by farm and cannery workers, Richard’s perspective is detached— he seems to have forgotten that his own birth was in a melon

At one-thirty in the morning, the General sent another assault wave to the base of the Bufa. “To keep the Federals alert,” he said. He lay on a field cot and slept, protected by a sarape from the light rain and early morning chill. He slept but a few minutes, waking when the machine-gun fire ceased. It was as if the silence had disturbed his sleep. —from The Fifth Horseman

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field in California’s Imperial Valley. Villarreal modeled Pocho after James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). In his second novel, The Fifth Horseman, Villarreal took his assimilationist philosophy one step further by attempting to write a novel that could be considered part of the Mexican literary tradition, even though the novel is written in English. As in Pocho, the Mexican Revolution provides the historical setting. Several scenes appear to be strongly influenced by Mexican novels about the revolution. The Fifth Horseman also recalls the many American novels about the Mexican Revolution that were written in the 1920’s and 1930’s, long before the Chicano rights movement; moreover, the novel’s title is even reminiscent of The Four Horsemen of

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Pocho Pocho (1959) is generally regarded as the first novel by an American of Mexican descent to represent the experiences of emigration from Mexico and acculturation to the United States. Although this pioneering work went out of print shortly after publication, a second edition appeared in 1970 during the Chicano Renaissance, and it has since been studied in many literature classes. Set in the years between 1923 and 1942, the years of the Great Depression, the novel recounts the quest for personal and cultural identity of Richard Rubio, son of a soldier exiled after the Mexican Revolution and now a migrant farmworker in Santa Clara, California. As a pocho, a member of the first generation born in the United States, Richard grows up deeply attached to the traditions of his family yet very attracted to the values of his American peers. In addition to trials faced by every young person—the struggle with authority, the search for independence, the thirst for knowledge, and the hunger for sexual experi-

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the Apocalypse (1916), the novel about World War I by the Spaniard Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. By thus acknowledging his American, Mexican, and Spanish heritage, Villarreal asserts his belief that the best literature is universal. In his third novel, Clemente Chacón, Villarreal depicts the plight of Chicanos in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The narrative has certain surreal qualities, which are perhaps the author’s way of suggesting that Chicanos had become totally divorced from their history by the second half of the twentieth century. For example, in the novel’s epilogue, a senator from Texas named Porfirio Díaz talks to the U.S. president about the problem of illegal Mexican aliens. — Douglas Edward LaPrade

ence—Richard faces special challenges in self-definition. He confronts poverty, family instability, a blighted education system, racial prejudice, a society torn by economic crises, and world war. His passage from childhood into adulthood is given unique shape by the Depression, by the turmoil of life as an itinerant farmworker and by the powerful tensions between Mexican and American cultures. Poverty inspires his dreams of success. He identifies intensely with his macho father but cannot abide his violence, coldness, and self-destructiveness. Drawn to the beauties of the Catholic Church, he nonetheless rejects faith. He is deeply attached to his mother but finds her helplessness repugnant. Obliged to become the man of the family as a teenager, he finds that his responsibilities clash with his solitary nature, his love of books, and his emerging personal identity as a writer. His choice to join the Navy is more personal than patriotic. To resolve his conflicts he chooses exile from his shattered family, escapes from his poverty without prospects, and seeks release from the fragments of the two cultures he has not yet pieced together. He leaves to face what he knows will be a struggle for a new identity as a man, as an artist, and as an American. — Virginia M. Crane

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Learn More Alarcón, Daniel Cooper. The Aztec Palimpsest: Mexico in the Modern Imagination. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997. Discusses images of Mexico in Pocho. Bruce-Novoa, Juan. Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980. Includes an interview with Villarreal that is an excellent source of information about the author’s childhood and education; the interview also offers valuable insights into Villarreal’s attitudes toward Chicano literature and literature in general. Leal, Luis. “The Fifth Horseman and Its Literary Antecedents.” Introduction to The Fifth Horseman. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974. This essay makes many references to Mexican and American novels about the Mexican Revolution that serve as sources or background for The Fifth Horseman. Saldívar, Ramón. Chicano Narrative. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Includes a subchapter entitled “Pocho and the Dialectics of History,” which explains how the protagonist must ignore history so he can assimilate in the United States.

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Victor Villaseñor Mexican American novelist, short-story writer, biographer, and screenwriter Born: Carlsbad, California; May 11, 1940 Also known as: Victor Edmundo Villaseñor long fiction: Macho!, 1973. short fiction: Walking Stars: Stories of Magic and Power, 1994. screenplay: The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, 1982. nonfiction: Jury: The People vs. Juan Corona, 1977; Rain of Gold, 1991; Wild Steps of Heaven, 1996; Thirteen Senses: A Memoir, 2001; Burro Genius: A Memoir, 2004.

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ictor Edmundo Villaseñor (VEE-tohr ehd-MEWN-doh VEEyah-sehn-YOHR) is one of the significant chroniclers of the Mexican American experience; his novel Macho! was, along with Richard Vásquez’s 1970 novel Chicano, one of the first Chicano novels issued by a mainstream publisher. Villaseñor was born to Mexican immigrant parents in Carlsbad, California. His parents, Lupe Gómez and Juan Salvador Villaseñor, who had immigrated with their families when young, were middle class, and Victor and his four siblings were brought up on their ranch in Oceanside. Villaseñor struggled with school from his very first day, being dyslexic and having spoken Spanish rather than English at home. He dropped out of high school, feeling that he would “go crazy” if he did not, and went to work on his parents’ ranch. He briefly attended college at the University of San Diego, where he discovered that reading books could be something other than drudgery, but left college after flunking most of his courses. He became a boxer for a brief period, then went to Mexico, where he suddenly became aware of Mexican art, literature, and history. He began to be proud of his heritage, rather than confused and ashamed, meeting Mexican doctors and lawyers—“heroes,” he says—for the first time. He read extensively. 711

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Juan wasn’t able to support his family by working only one shift at the Copper Queen, so he decided to change his name to Juan Cruz and get a second job on the night shift. After all, he was going on thirteen. He figured that he could hold down both shifts. . . . Hell, the big, thick-necked gringo boss couldn’t tell him apart from all the other Mexicans. —from Rain of Gold

Returning to California at his parents’ insistence, Villaseñor worked in construction beginning in 1965 and painstakingly taught himself how to write. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) was particularly inspirational. He wrote extensively, producing many novels and short stories. They were steadily rejected until Bantam Books decided to take a chance and publish Macho! in 1973. The novel’s protagonist is a young man named Roberto García, and the novel covers roughly a year in his life, first in his home village in Mexico, then in California, then in Mexico again. Somewhat unwillingly, Roberto journeys northward with a group of norteños from his village to earn money working in the fields of California. Roberto’s personification of—and finally, inability to fully accept—the traditional social code of machismo; his conflicts with others, notably fellow norteño Pedro; and the larger labor struggle between migrant workers and landowners in California provide the central action of the book. Macho! received favorable reviews. The year of its initial publication Villaseñor married Barbara Bloch, the daughter of his editor; they have two sons, David and Joe. Villaseñor built a house on his parents’ property, and as his sons grew older he enjoyed horseback riding with them. Villaseñor’s second major published work was nonfiction. Jury: The People vs. Juan Corona details the trial of a serial killer. Villaseñor had read about the case after Macho! had been accepted for publication, and it captured his interest—Corona 712

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had been arrested for murdering twenty-five derelicts. Villaseñor extensively interviewed the members of the jury that convicted Corona and thoroughly examined the complex and controversial trial. (The jury had deliberated for eight grueling days before reaching a verdict.) After the book’s publication, he received some criticism for his interpretations of the events. Villaseñor subsequently wrote the screenplay for The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, based partly on writer Américo Paredes’s account of the adventures of Cortez, a real-life figure, eluding the Texas Rangers around 1900. Villaseñor tells the story using multiple points of view, effectively relating the story of a man driven by circumstances into the life of a bandit while showing the prejudices and racism of the times. Written for television, the film won an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities; it was also released to theaters. Rain of Gold, published in 1991 after more than ten years of research and writing, is the multigenerational story of Villa-

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Macho! The protagonist of Macho! (1973) is Roberto, a young Mexican who immigrates illegally into the United States. Victor Villaseñor suggests that Roberto extracts his identity from the soil of the fields that he works. On the first and last pages of the book, Villaseñor describes how volcanic ash has enriched the soil of a Mexican valley. At the end of the novel, Roberto has returned to this valley to work the land, applying what he has learned in the United States. These homages to volcanic ash suggest that soil is not just the earth’s outer covering but also its soul. Likewise, the soil is the soul of the people who work it. The novel refers to the Mexican Revolution, a popular movement to redistribute the ownership of land, to say that land is fundamental to understanding not only the Mexican people but also the country’s politics and history. According to Villaseñor, Mexico’s geography dictates the country’s indigenous law. Mexico is mountainous, so villages are isolated. As a result of their isolation, these villages developed their own systems of justice and never ap-

señor’s family. It begins in the days before the turbulence of the Mexican Revolution and continues through life after migration to the United States in the early twentieth century, and it is told with some dramatic fictionalization. It was dubbed the “Chicano Roots” by those who compared it with Alex Haley’s story of his African American family’s history. Rain of Gold tells readers much about Mexican history and about anti-Hispanic prejudice in the American Southwest. The book was almost published two years earlier by G. P. Putnam’s, but Villaseñor became unhappy with the company at the last minute for insisting that the book be called “Rio Grande” (“a John Wayne movie,” he scoffed) and wanting to cut its length and call it fiction in order to boost sales. 714

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peal to a higher authority. This law of the land is a violent code of honor, and the novel documents how this code places a premium on a woman’s virginity and on a man’s ability to fight. The definition of “macho” must necessarily emanate from an understanding of this law of the land. The novel makes frequent references to César Chávez’s movement in the 1960’s to unionize agricultural workers in the United States. Villaseñor offers a complex portrait of Chávez, not allowing him to become a cardboard cutout representative of Mexicans who identify themselves with the soil. Chávez’s movement distinguishes between the illegal Mexican immigrants, whom Chávez wanted deported, and the Mexican Americans, whose rights he sought to protect through unionization. Villaseñor concludes that Chávez is a “true-self hero,” one who is not labeled readily as macho, but who trusts his own conscience and is not afraid to have enemies. In this respect, Chávez is like Abraham Lincoln, Benito Juárez, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. On the novel’s final page, Villaseñor qualifies Roberto also as a true-self hero when the protagonist returns to his native valley to work the fields. — Douglas Edward LaPrade

The company agreed to let him buy back his book, for which Villaseñor remortgaged his home. Published in its original form and with the original title (a translation of La Lluvia de Oro, his mother’s birthplace in Mexico) by Arte Público, it was well received and was widely considered Villaseñor’s masterwork. Wild Steps of Heaven recounts the history of Villaseñor’s father’s family in the highlands of Jalisco, Mexico, before the events covered in Rain of Gold; Villaseñor considered it part two of a “Rain of Gold” trilogy, and he planned to follow it with the story of his mother’s family. He draws on stories told by his father and members of his extended family, relating them in a folkloric style that sometimes verges on Magical Realism. Walk715

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ing Stars: Stories of Magic and Power, published two years before Wild Steps of Heaven, consists of stories for young readers that attempt both to entertain and to inspire; each of the stories, most based on events in the early lives of his parents, concludes with notes in which the author discusses the stories’ meanings, emphasizing the spiritual magic that people’s lives embody. — McCrea Adams Learn More Barbato, Joseph. “Latino Writers in the American Market.” Publishers Weekly, February 1, 1991, 17-21. Discusses the publishing of Rain of Gold and includes an interview with Villaseñor. Guilbault, Rose Del Castillo. “Americanization Is Tough on ‘Macho.’” In American Voices: Multicultural Literacy and Critical Thinking, edited by Dolores Laguardia and Hans P. Guth. Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield, 1992. Focuses on the concept of macho, central to Villaseñor’s first book. Also has an interview with Villaseñor. Kelsey, Verlene. “Mining for a Usable Past: Acts of Recovery, Resistence, and Continuity in Victor Villaseñor’s Rain of Gold.” Bilingual Review 18 (January-April, 1993): 79-85. Extensive review and close reading of Villaseñor’s book. Tatum, Charles M. Chicano Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Includes a discussion of Villaseñor.

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Helena María Viramontes Mexican American novelist and short-story writer Born: East Los Angeles, California; February 26, 1954 long fiction: Under the Feet of Jesus, 1995; Their Dogs Came with Them, 2000. short fiction: The Moths, and Other Stories, 1985; “Miss Clairol,” 1987; “Tears on My Pillow,” 1992; “The Jumping Bean,” 1993. nonfiction: “Nopalitos: The Making of Fiction,” 1989; “Why I Write,” 1995. edited texts: Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature, 1987, revised 1996 (with María Herrera-Sobek); Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film, 1995 (with Herrera-Sobek).

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elena María Viramontes (heh-LAY-nah mah-REE-ah VEErah-MON-tays) made a name for herself as a fiction writer, educator, and active participant in Latino literary and artistic groups. One of the founders of Southern California Latino Writers and Filmmakers, Viramontes also lectured in New Delhi, India, and participated in a women’s writing discussion group in the People’s Republic of China. Her work was included in several major anthologies, including The Oxford Book of Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). The major themes of Viramontes’s fiction, the oppression of women and the problems faced by working-class Chicanos, can be traced to her childhood experiences. Viramontes’s parents, Mary Louise and Serafin Viramontes, met as migrant workers and settled in East Los Angeles, where Viramontes was raised with six sisters and three brothers. In “Nopalitos,” she depicts her mother as a kind, energetic woman who often took in friends and relatives who needed a place to stay. Viramontes de717

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La llorona only comes at night. When it’s day, Veronica will always stay. That’s what I say. I don’t like Veronica. . . . I’m ascared of her cause her mama died a few months back, when the so hot so hot you could fry your toes on the tar street. And every time I seen her, I remember if it’s possible for my mama to die too. —from “Tears on My Pillow”

scribes her father, a construction worker, as a man who worked hard but responded to the stresses of his job and family responsibilities with drinking and angry outbursts. Viramontes started writing while attending Immaculate Heart College, from which she received a B.A. in English in 1975. In 1977 her story “Requiem for the Poor” received first prize in a competition sponsored by the California State University in Los Angeles’s Statement magazine; in 1978 she received the same prize for “The Broken Web.” In 1979 she entered the creative writing program at the University of California at Irvine (UCI), where her story “Birthday” won first prize for fiction in the University’s Chicano Literary Contest. After leaving the UCI creative writing program in 1981 Viramontes continued to write and to take a leading role in local literary and artistic organizations. Two short stories, “Snapshots” and “Growing,” were published in Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (1983); in 1984 “The Broken Web” appeared in the anthology Woman of Her Word. These and other stories first published in magazines such as XhismeArte and Maize were gathered in Viramontes’s first book, The Moths, and Other Stories. The stories in The Moths, and Other Stories focus on women, usually Latinas, struggling against traditional social and cultural roles. Oppressive fathers, misguided husbands, and priests who are blind to women’s real needs and problems contribute to the pain experienced by Viramontes’s female protagonists. How718


ever, the rebellious adolescent girls in “Growing” and “The Moths” find that their mothers collaborate in the loss of freedom and in the social limitations placed upon mujeres, or women. In “The Long Reconciliation” Amanda, a married Mexican woman, chooses to abort a child rather than allow it to starve, but the price she must pay is her husband’s rejection and abandonment. The concerns of older women are also depicted in “Snapshots” and “Neighbors.” In “The Cariboo Cafe” Viramontes extends her representation of women to include the plight of Central American mothers whose children have been “disappeared.” In addition to sharing common themes, the stories in The Moths are linked by Viramontes’s skillful handling of multiple narrators and stream of consciousness. In 1987 Viramontes, along with María Herrera-Sobek, organized a conference at UCI on Mexican American women writers. Viramontes’s short story “Miss Clairol” was included in the conference proceedings, Chicana Creativity and Criticism, which she also coedited. Viramontes’s growing reputation was enhanced in 1989 by a National Endowment for the Arts grant, an invitation to attend a storytelling workshop with Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel García Márquez at the Sundance Institute, and the publication of her autobiographical essay “Nopalitos” in Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings. In 1991 she was awarded a residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts. Viramontes returned to the University of California writing program in 1992, the same year in which “Tears on My Pillow” appeared in New Chicana/Chicano Writing. In 1993 Viramontes received her M.F.A., completed the manuscript that was published as Under the Feet of Jesus in 1995, and published another story, “The Jumping Bean,” in the anthology Pieces of the Heart. Viramontes began to teach creative writing at Cornell University in the fall of 1993. Viramontes’s novel Under the Feet of Jesus combines realism with lyrical passages to depict the harsh circumstances faced by a family of migrant farmworkers. Abandoned by her husband, Petra, the mother, lives with Perfecto, a man thirty-seven years her senior, who is torn between his obligations to Petra and her family and his desire to return to his home in Mexico. 719


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Under the Feet of Jesus Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) traces the day-to-day lives of a group of Chicano migrant farmworkers, revealing the struggles they endure. Viramontes is the daughter of migrant workers, and the book is dedicated to her parents and to the memory of César Chávez, who fought for the rights of farmworkers. Perfecto Flores, a man in his seventies, and Petra, who is thirty-seven years younger, travel together with Petra’s children, finding field work wherever they can. Estrella is Petra’s eldest daughter; she is thirteen, and her voice controls much of the narrative. The story is complicated by a young man named Alejo, who works in the same field as Estrella. He earns extra money by stealing fruit until he is accidentally sprayed with pesticides and becomes very sick. Petra tries all her healing methods, but nothing seems to work. Alejo gets sicker each day, but as he grows weaker, love between Alejo and Estrella grows. Finally Estrella and her family take Alejo to the clinic. The nurse diagnoses Alejo with dysentery, tells Estrella that he must go to the hospital, and charges them ten dollars for the clinic visit. Unfortunately Perfecto only has eight dollars and some change, and their gas tank is empty. He attempts to barter with the nurse, telling her he can do chores for the clinic, but she insists that she cannot give him work. Perfecto reluctantly hands over their last nine dollars, and they leave the clinic, wondering what they are going to do. Finally Estrella takes out a tire iron, and walks back into the clinic. She smashes the tire iron against the nurse’s desk and demands the nine dollars back. With the last of their money Perfecto fills the gas tank, and they drive to the hospital. Estrella is forced to leave Alejo in the emergency room knowing they cannot pay the bill but that the doctors will help him. — Angela Athy

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Perfecto’s gentleness and concern for Petra contrast sharply with the kind of male characters that dominate The Moths. The novel focuses upon thirteen-year-old Estrella, whose life has been one of impermanence and loss. Though drained by exhaustion and poverty, Estrella finds the strength to fight the injustice of her life when her first love, Alejo, falls ill after being exposed to pesticides. After the family has spent all the money they have on a useless medical examination for Alejo, Estrella threatens a nurse with a crowbar, recovers the family’s money, and enables Alejo to receive treatment at a hospital. The novel ends with Estrella perched on the roof of a barn she had longed to climb, an image that conveys her determination, heroism, and triumph. — Maura Ives Learn More Carbonell, Ana Maria. “From Llarona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros.” MELUS 24 (Summer, 1999): 53-74. Analyzes the representations of the Mexican goddess Coatlicue and the folkloric figure of the wailing ghost La Llorona in the works of Mexican American women writers Viramontes and Sandra Cisneros. Castillo, Debra A., and María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba. Border Women: Writing from La Frontera. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. An analysis of writing by women living on both sides of the American-Mexican border, examining how these writers question accepted ideas about border identities. Garza-Falcón, Leticia. Gente Decente: A Borderlands Response to the Rhetoric of Dominance. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Garza-Falcón analyzes work by Viramontes and other writers of Mexican descent whose narratives counter the myth of the fearless white Anglo male settler bringing civilization to the American Southwest. Green, Carol Hurd, and Mary Grimley Mason. American Women Writers. New York: Continuum, 1994. Includes a brief biographical sketch as well as an analysis of the short stories in Moths. 721


McCracken, Ellen. New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999. Viramontes’s work is included in this analysis of writing by Cuban American, Puerto Rican American, Mexican American, and Dominican American writers. McCracken explains how these writers have redefined concepts of multiculturalism and diversity in American society. Moore, Deborah Owen. “La Llorona Dines at the Cariboo Cafe: Structure and Legend in the Works of Helena María Viramontes.” Studies in Short Fiction 35 (Summer, 1998): 277-286. Contrasts the distant and close-up narrative perspectives in Viramontes’s work. Mujcinovic, Fatima. Postmodern Cross-culturalism and Politicization in U.S. Latina Literature: From Ana Castillo to Julia Alverez. Modern American Literature 42. New York: P. Lang, 2004. Viramontes’s work is examined in this literary and cultural analysis of the work of Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and Dominican American women writers. Mujcinovic views these writers’ work from a contemporary feminist, political, post-colonial, and psychoanalytical perspective. Yarbo-Bejarano, Yvonne. Introduction to The Moths, and Other Stories, by Helena María Viramontes. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1995. Discusses Viramontes’s portrayal of women characters who struggle against the restrictions placed on them by the Chicano culture, the church, and the men in these women’s lives.

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Hugo Wast Argentine novelist Born: Córdoba, Argentina; October 23, 1883 Died: Buenos Aires, Argentina; March 28, 1962 Also known as: Gustavo Adolfo Martínez Zuviría long fiction: Alegre, 1905; Flor de durazno, 1911 (Peach Blossom, 1929); Casa de los cuevos, 1916 (The House of the Ravens, 1924); Valle negro, 1918 (Black Valley, 1928); La corbata celeste, 1920; Pata de zorra, 1924; Desierto de piedra, 1925 (Stone Desert, 1928); Myriam la conspiradora, 1926; Lucía Miranda, 1929. nonfiction: Año X, 1960 (history).

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ustavo Adolfo Martínez Zuviría, known in literature as Hugo Wast (HEW-goh vahst), was born in Córdoba, Argentina, in 1883. While still a university student he wrote his first novel, Alegre, published in 1905. Then he went on to become a doctor of laws, in 1907, and joined the University of Santa Fe as professor of economics and sociology. Politics also attracted

Sometimes she convinced herself that she was suffering for the wrongdoing of others, that she must have more than atoned for her own mistake, that the whole thing would never have occurred if the two families had been friends—or at least had not hated each other on account of those wretched pieces of land. —from Black Valley (trans. Herman and Miriam Hespelt)

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him, and he served several terms in the Argentine Congress. He was the longtime director of Argentina’s National Library; later he served as minister of education. After two juvenile attempts at novel writing, he published a serious novel about unmarried love, Peach Blossom, in 1911. Afraid that the critics of Buenos Aires would scorn any work of a provincial author, he signed it with an anagram of his first name, from which he made “Hugo Wast.” The novel proved a success. During the next forty years, Wast published thirty-three books, many of them through a company that he organized. His books have appeared with Spanish and Chilean imprints in nearly three hundred editions, and nearly a million and a half copies have been sold. In addition, some seventy translations have appeared in eleven different languages.

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Black Valley Gracian Palma was fourteen when his father died suddenly, and the boy, already motherless, became the ward of Senor Palma’s old and trusted friend, Don Jesús de Viscarra. Don Jesús takes Gracian to Black Valley for the summer. Gracian soon begins to feel that there is a mystery at Black Valley that he does not understand. Don Jesús is embroiled in a bitter boundary dispute with Don Pablo de Camargos, which is complicated by the love of his sister, Flavia, for Don Camargos (the father of her secret child). Years pass, and Gracian leaves to travel abroad, but when he returns he goes to see Flavia, who is taking care of Don Pablo, now a broken, sad man. There Gracian meets Flavia’s daughter, Victoria, and the two are in love until Gracian reunites with his longtime friend Mirra and falls in love with her. The two plan to marry until Mirra learns that Victoria is expecting a child, and she sends Gracian away from Black Valley and back to Victoria.

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Wast’s best-selling novel, The House of the Ravens, won for him a prize from El Ateneo in 1915. For Black Valley he won the gold medal of the Spanish Academy, which later made him a corresponding member and enlarged its dictionary by the inclusion of words from his writing. Stone Desert was awarded the Grand National Prize of Argentine Literature for the year of its appearance. Wast’s novels can be divided into several groups. One series, for example, covers the history of his country from the earliest days of exploration and conquest, as told in Lucía Miranda, through the struggle for independence shown in Myriam la conspiradora (Myriam the conspirator), the period of the dictatorship dramatized in La corbata celeste (the blue necktie), and into the future in later novels.

Black Valley (1918) is subtitled A Romance of the Argentine. The romantic elements of the novel are readily apparent. A story of a primitive way of life and elemental emotions, the action has been staged against a background of wild natural beauty. Hugo Wast’s settings are real, as are his people and the way of life he presents. The plot, although episodic in form, is well ordered, and the story moves forward with increasing emotional and dramatic interest as the writer unfolds the dual theme presented through the ill-fated love of Flavia and Don Pablo and the relationship of spoiled, weak Gracian and strong, devoted Mirra. The style is vigorous, precise, and pure. Wast was educated by Jesuits just before the end of the nineteenth century. He felt that women were morally superior to men and excoriated cruelty, selfishness, and the flint-hearted rich. Atheism and Communism were attacked in his oceanic literary output, as were the excesses of the Catholic church. Wast’s early and prolonged popularity with Argentine readers stemmed not only from his nationalism but also from his knack for jerking urban readers out of their stifling settings with the rustic beauty of his novels. Black Valley promptly became a best-seller and won a gold medal from the prestigious Spanish Academy.

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Wast’s training in economics and sociology is apparent in his problem novels set in rural regions and in his fictional treatment of urban problems in others. He had young readers in mind for several novels, especially the amusing 1924 work Pata de zorra, named for a fortune teller who tries to help a university student pass his examination in Roman law. It is for the number of readers whom Wast’s writings have attracted, rather than for any particular influence he has exerted on his contemporaries, that he merits a place in Argentine literature. Learn More Hespelt, E. H. “Hugo Wast, Argentine Novelist.” Hispania 7 (1924). An analysis of Wast’s work. Magaldi, Juan Bautista. En torno a Hugo Wast. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Peregrino, 1995. A Spanish-language critique of Wast’s work. Moreno, Juan Carlos. Genio y figura de Hugo Wast. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1969. In Spanish. Sedgwick, Ruth. “Hugo Wast, Argentina’s Most Popular Novelist.” Hispanic American Historical Review 9 (1929). A profile of Wast.

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Agustín Yáñez Mexican novelist Born: Guadalajara, Mexico; May 4, 1904 Died: Mexico City, Mexico; January 17, 1980 long fiction: Archipiélago de mujeres, 1943 (novella); Pasión y convalecencia, 1943; Al filo del agua, 1947 (The Edge of the Storm, 1963); La tierra pródiga, 1960; Las tierras flacas, 1962 (The Lean Lands, 1968). short fiction: Espejismo de Juchitán, 1940; Esta es mala suerte, 1945. nonfiction: Genio y figuras de Guadalajara, 1940; Flor de juegos antiguos, 1942; Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, el conquistador conquistado, 1942 (biography); El contenido social de la literatura iberoamericana, 1944; Alfonso Gutierrez Hermosillo y algunos amigos, 1945 (biography); Yahualica, 1946; Don Justo Sierra, su vida, sus ideas y su obra, 1950 (biography).

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ven as a child and adolescent, Agustín Yáñez (ah-gewsTEEN yah-NYAYS) had what he later called a “rigorous critical sense” as well as a “sentimental temperament” so intense that it “could not but manifest itself, even exaggeratedly, and ended in coloring his life absolutely.” The characteristics of seriousness, austerity, and preoccupation with artistic form shaped all his literary work. Yáñez associated himself with other young writers of Guadalajara and founded a literary journal, Bandera de Provincias (provincial banner), the establishment of which was a national event. He received his law degree in Guadalajara and later moved to Mexico City, where he devoted himself to university teaching and writing and held several important public offices. According to the aesthetic creed of Yáñez, the ideal of art is form. For him, the idea of literary form follows a movement inward, a theory of composition initiated by means of living the re727

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ality and then reliving it in the literary work until one completes it in the appropriate verbal form. “I never write—least of all when writing novels—with the intention of sustaining a premeditated thesis, committed to predetermined conclusions.” After intuiting a form, he would develop it until it took on consistency; it was then necessary that he follow it, striving not to falsify characters, situations, and atmosphere. Yáñez as a writer was very conscious and cognizant of his function. His style is elaborate, reflective, grave, and refined. His knowledge of contemporary philosophy, of the Spanish classics, and of the resources of the modern novel infuses his work. Almost all of Yáñez’s works have reminiscence as a common ingredient. On the occasion of the commemoration of the fourth centennial of the founding of Guadalajara, he wrote two books: Flor de juegos antiguos, lyrical memories of his childhood and of the games of his province, and Genio y figuras de Guadalajara, in which he presents a brief description of this city in 1930 and character studies of its principal citizens throughout its history. In 1943 he published Archipiélago de mujeres, a collection of seven stories, each one called by the name of a woman who represents a step on the author’s “ladder of adolescence”: music, revelation, desire, beauty, folly, death, and love. In The Edge of the Storm (the literal translation of the title is “to the edge of the water”), Yáñez produced his best novel and, according to many critics, one of the finest Mexican novels of the

“I tell you, Padre, it can’t go on like this; sooner or later the worm will turn, and for better or worse, things will change. To be frank, it would be better if the gringos did come and teach us their way of life than for us to stay the way we are now, living no life at all. Who enjoys it? Tell me.” —from The Edge of the Storm (trans. Ethel Brinton)

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mid-twentieth century. In a prose that is dense, unhackneyed, and subtle, he presents the life of a typical pueblo of Jalisco. In the routine and monotony of everyday life, passion and religion are the two stimuli of these provincial small-town people. The dramas of conscience brought about by the conflicts of flesh and spirit are analyzed with subtle introspection. Two other books complete his trilogy of novels about Jalisco, his native land—La tierra pródiga (the lavish land) and The Lean Lands. During the time he held the office of governor of Jalisco, he had the opportunity to obtain firsthand knowledge of the inhabitants of its coastal region. From this contact, La tierra pródiga was born as a portrait of the struggle between barbarism and civilization that results in humankind’s finally overcoming nature. In The Lean Lands he re-creates the atmosphere of The Edge of the Storm, namely, the secluded, traditional life of small 729

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The Edge of the Storm Al filo del agua (literally, “on the edge of the water”), the Spanish title for The Edge of the Storm (1947), has two meanings. It signifies the moment that the rain begins, and it also refers to something imminent. The imminent event in Agustín Yáñez’s novel, the Mexican Revolution, was brought on by dissatisfaction with the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and by social unrest. The Roman Catholic church was deeply affected by the unrest; hence, the novel’s emphasis on religion. Yáñez has painted a series of character studies portraying the effects of a rigid and conventional life on different people, some of whom have had exposure to outside influences. In the eyes of the village, these influences are negative, and include bright clothing, strangers, uncensored writings, and fun. The fictitious but typical town in which the action takes place is set in the state of Jalisco, of which the author was a native. Don Dionisio, the stern and upright but compassionate parish priest, touches in some way the lives of all the other characters in the book. Two other personalities who present a study in contrasts are María and Marta, Don Dionisio’s orphaned nieces. Marta is contented with her work and children, but María is rebellious and joins the revolutionary army. Like all the characters who come in contact with the outside world, María’s downfall is doubt, and she falls under the weight of a relentless social system that will tolerate no questioning. The novel hints at a time near at hand in which many doubters will join together with enough force to rebel against Mexican society and force a crack in the wall of hypocrisy (hence the meaning of the title). The book is not a call to arms; rather, it presents an understanding, scathingly honest, and touching portrait of life in a Mexican town at the beginning of the twentieth century. — Linda Prewett Davis

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towns, with arid lands and a people unfazed by the appearance of technology. Yáñez’s studies of Mexican literature are well regarded. Particularly outstanding are those devoted to the chronicles of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and to the native myths of the preHispanic epoch. Yáñez contributed to the modernization of the Mexican novel, and he is considered a forerunner of the Spanish American narratives of the 1960’s that achieved world acclaim. — Emil Volek Learn More Brushwood, John S. “The Lyric Style of Agustín Yáñez.” Symposium 26 (1972). Discusses Al filo del agua. Detjens, Wilma Else. Home as Creation: The Influence of Early Childhood Experience in the Literary Creation of Gabriel García Márquez, Agustín Yáñez, and Juan Rulfo. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Detjens analyzes the relationship of childhood to the creative process in The Edge of the Storm and novels by other Latin American authors. Harris, Christopher. The Novels of Agustín Yáñez: A Critical Portrait of Mexico in the Twentieth Century. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 2000. Argues that the novelist of the Mexican Revolution, who was also a member of the government, was dedicated to economic development, eradication of corruption, and freedom of artistic expression. Longo, Teresa. “Renewing the Creation of Myth: An Analysis of Rhythm and Image in the ‘Acto preparatorio’ of Yáñez’s Al filo del agua.” Confluencia 4, no. 1 (Fall, 1988). Structure and myth in this novel are reconsidered. Sommers, Joseph. “Genesis of the Storm: Agustín Yáñez.” In After the Storm: Landmarks of the Modern Mexican Novel. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968. An excellent point of departure for a study of Yáñez.

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Jose Yglesias Cuban American novelist Born: Tampa, Florida; November 29, 1919 Died: New York, New York; November 7, 1995 long fiction: A Wake in Ybor City, 1963; An Orderly Life, 1967; The Truth About Them, 1971; Double Double, 1974; The Kill Price, 1976; Home Again, 1985; Tristan and the Hispanics, 1989; Breakin, 1996; The Old Gents, 1996 (novella). short fiction: The Guns in the Closet, 1996. drama: Chattahoochee, pr. 1989; The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, pr. 1989; You Don’t Remember?, pr. 1989; New York 1937, pr. 1990. nonfiction: The Goodbye Land, 1967; In the Fist of the Revolution, 1968; Down There, 1970; The Franco Years, 1977. translations: Island of Women, 1962 (pb. in England as Sands of Torremolinos); Villa Milo, 1962; The Party’s Over, 1966.

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ose Yglesias (hoh-SAY eeg-LAY-see-ahs) is best known for being a prolific writer whose works are often about individual lives and hardship in Cuba and in Latin American countries affected by revolutions. Of Cuban and Spanish descent, Yglesias was born to Jose and Georgia Milian Yglesias in Tampa, Florida. He worked as a stock clerk and a dishwasher when he moved to New York City at age seventeen. Yglesias then served in the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1945 during World War II; he received a naval citation of merit. After the war, he attended Black Mountain College in 1946. He married Helen Basine, a novelist, on August 19, 1950. Yglesias held numerous jobs during his lifetime, from assembly line worker to film critic, from assistant to a vice president of a pharmaceutical company to Regents Lecturer at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1973. Yglesias’s birthplace greatly influenced his literary concern and career. He was born in the section of Tampa called Ybor

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City. Until Ybor City, a cigar-making town, was founded by V. Martinez Ybor in 1885, there were not many Latinos in Tampa. As Ybor City and its economy grew, Cubans and other Latinos arrived and brought their own cultural activities and vibrant traditions. These aspects of life in Ybor City served as inspiration and material for Yglesias’s plays and books. According to him, these events must be documented so that the history and cultural richness of that part of America will not be forgotten. Descriptions of Ybor City and its history can be found in the pages of Yglesias’s first novel, A Wake in Ybor City. The novel is a colorful and interesting depiction of Cuban immigrants in the Latin section of Tampa on the eve of the Cuban Revolution in 1958. The story deals with family dynamics, class envy, sexual intrigues, and cultural assimilation, along with machismo and matriarchal powers in conflict. This novel started his prolific writing career, in which he would move back and forth between fiction and nonfiction. Being of Cuban and Spanish ancestry also greatly influenced Yglesias’s second book, The Goodbye Land. The laborious energy required—as well as personal desire—to travel to the mountainside village of Galacia, Spain, in 1964 in order to trace his father’s birth and death there proved to be worthwhile; the book

It was a stand-off. Tristan knew how to steer past the reefs of his parents’ angers. He was not one to boast—quietude had been (until Nanao) his most dearly won companion—but to himself he could say that he had always picked his way between Mom and Dad with such care that no one was bruised. Especially himself. (He did not know if he had inherited this trait or had picked out for himself, as at a shop.) —from Tristan and the Hispanics”

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Jose Yglesias

Arte Público Press

was a great success and was praised by many critics for its authenticity as a travel narrative. Many of Yglesias’s books since The Goodbye Land deal with personal statements and individuality amid the revolutionary experience. His nonfiction work In the Fist of the Revolution addresses individual lives and hopes amid political and social problems in the town of Miyari, Cuba. The Franco Years depicts the living conditions of the author’s Spanish acquaintances under the Fascist regime of dictator Francisco Franco, who died in Spain in 1976. (Yglesias was in Spain at the time.) Again, many critics agreed that these two books demonstrate authentic social reporting because the author, while in Cuba and Spain interviewing people, experienced their hardships and turmoil. That authenticity reflects the critical talent and genuine objectivity of Yglesias, who went against the mainstream literary fashion of political and social analysis and moralizing. Yglesias’s talent and honesty in his literary desire to present emotions, aspirations, and disappointments unique to Latino 734

Jose Yglesias

émigrés in the United States led to success and critical acclaim in his novels as well as nonfiction works. His persistent interest in individual lives, the immigrant experience, and cultural assimilation can be seen in novels such as The Kill Price, Home Again, and Tristan and the Hispanics. Mainly known for writing novels, nonfiction, and translation, Yglesias was also a talented dramatist. He wrote only four plays,

W H A T

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The Truth About Them Yglesias’s The Truth About Them (1971) focuses on the family history of a Cuban American clan whose American experience dates from 1890, when the narrator’s aristocratic grandmother first arrived in Tampa, Florida. Although much of their life in America is associated with the up-and-down fortunes of Florida’s cigar industry, this working-class family displays a pride and cohesiveness that defy all obstacles. During the lean years of the 1930’s, some members of the clan are forced to go north to New York City in search of jobs. Before long, however, they find themselves drifting back to Ybor City, owned and controlled by the cigar company. The narrator, much like Roberto of A Wake in Ybor City, is truly a Cuban American. Brought up in the very Latin atmosphere of Ybor City, he eventually becomes a left-wing journalist and learns to swim freely in America’s traditionless mainstream. Eager to learn more about his Latin roots, however, he visits postrevolutionary Cuba. Written in an episodic style (several adventures were first published separately in The New Yorker), this fictionalized family portrait with its rich and varied characters and its free-flowing style, offers a panoramic vision of a part of America generally unknown to non-Cuban Americans. Its detailed and loving depiction of Cuban culture suggests that America is greater for having accepted such resolute and distinctive communities. — Richard Keenan

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Jose Yglesias

three of which—Chattahoochee, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and You Don’t Remember?—form a trilogy set in Ybor City in 1912, 1920, and 1989, respectively. The fourth play, New York 1937, is an autobiographical comedy involving cigar making and the Great Depression, set in Manhattan’s Washington Heights. In his plays, Yglesias’s creative drive and imagination brings his characters to life upon the stage. In addition to his efforts as novelist and dramatist, Yglesias contributed major articles for prestigious literary magazines, newspapers, and other periodicals. He was the patriarch of a literary family, which included his former wife and his son Rafael, also a novelist and screenwriter. Yglesias died of cancer in 1995. His body of work places him as one of the pioneers of modern American and Latino literature. — H. N. Nguyen Learn More Baskin, Leonard. “Jose Yglesias.” Tampa Review 13 (1996). This article examines Yglesias, the literary influence of his work, and his overall literary life. Hospital, Carolina, and Jorge Cantera, eds. A Century of Cuban Writers in Florida: Selected Prose and Poetry. Sarasota, Fla.: Pineapple Press, 1996. Yglesias is one of the thirty-three writers whose work is included in this anthology of Cubans who have lived, or who are living today, in Florida. The introduction by the editors describes the historical importance of the Cuban connection to Florida’s heritage. “Jose Yglesias.” In Contemporary Novelists. 6th ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1996. This reference article provides an overview of Yglesias’s significant work and highlights a few of his books.

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Essays

Latino and Latin American Drama

A

brief survey of Latin American drama cannot do justice to the more than five-hundred-year history of such a vast body of work, even if a skeptic might make short shrift of much of the dramatic literature of Latin America. From the Southern Cone to the Latino communities of North America, from the earliest mystery plays used by the Spaniards to convert and assimilate the indigenous peoples to the drawing-room comedies that have plagued serious critics and enthralled huge audiences throughout the past century, from the derivative experimentalism of arcane ensembles to the educational and agitprop methods of hundreds of revolutionary groups—all have made an impressive mark on theatrical performance. Because of the historical importance of unscripted work (such as pre-Columbian religious rituals, colonial pageants, and “folk” theater) and of unpublished works of which only the gist and impact have been recorded, many recent scholars of Latin American theater study more than just texts that have been preserved as dramatic scripts and take into account a great deal of anthropological and even archaeological evidence to describe this complex and multifaceted history. Aztec Precedents Although many civilizations flourished in Central and South America thousands of years before the coming of the Spanish conquistadores, the history of pre-Columbian theater is poorly understood. There are many reasons for this gap, including the fact that few records from the ancient Mayan, Olmec, and Aztec civilizations survive, and those that do exist are difficult for modern scholars to interpret. The main records of the Aztec civilization come from Spanish monks who arrived in the New World to convert the Aztecs to Christianity. Naturally, these records are biased in favor of European civilization. 739


Performance art for the Aztecs was basically religious and demonstrated the central focus of Aztec theology: the great interconnectedness between humanity and the gods. The Aztec calendar had eighteen months, and each month was marked with a major festival paying homage to the gods: Many of these festivals involved spectacular dances of numbers of performers wearing elaborate and beautiful costumes honoring, for instance, the Aztec god of rain and wind, Quetzalcóatl. This is probably the origin of the traditional quetzal dance still performed annually in Mexico, in which dancers wear headgear of paper, silk, and feathers measuring up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) in diameter. A major component of Aztec performance ritual was human sacrifice: For the Aztecs, this sacrifice demonstrated their connection to the divine, and sacrificial victims were thought to enjoy special privileges in the afterlife. One great theatrical ritual of the Aztecs was the ritual honoring the god Xipe Totec in the second month. In this ritual, prisoners reenacted sacred battles with Aztec warriors, similar to the Ta$ziyeh plays still performed in Arab countries. At the end of the battle, the prisoners were shot with arrows or had their hearts removed with flint knives. Their limbs were then eaten in a ceremonial stew at a special meal. In the fifth month ceremony, a young man who had spent a year spiritually impersonating the god Tezcatlipoca started a ritual of singing and dancing, and playing sacred instruments. At the end of the ceremony, he would climb the steps of a temple, breaking the instruments, and was seized by priests who swiftly removed his heart and head. In the eleventh month, the mother-goddess was honored by an old woman who impersonated the goddess by ritually reenacting spiritual events. Finally, she was decapitated and her flayed skin was worn by a male priest to demonstrate the unity of male and female in the divine plan. Colonial Era The Spanish conquest of the New World began in the 1490’s, when the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City) was one of the largest cities in the world. The Spaniards were im740


pressed with the Aztec accomplishments: Hernán Cortés wrote to his king that the palaces of King Moctezuma (Montezuma) were grander than anything in Spain, and the Spanish soldiers believed the marketplaces of the city to be greater than those of Rome or Constantinople. However, the conquering Spaniards saw the indigenous Americans only as misguided savages despite their ancient and complex culture and their great achievements in architecture, art, weaving, and metalwork. To Spanish monks, the great Aztec gods were merely the devil in disguise, and converting the Aztecs to Christianity and destroying their culture became a primary mission of the conquering Spaniards. Theater was one of the chief forms of entertainment of these newcomers, who often performed actos, entreméses, or even dramas to fill their leisure time. Thus in the explorers’ chronicles there are reports that soldiers acted for fun in the late sixteenth century, in northwestern outposts that are now part of the southwestern United States, and in the 1760’s, shortly after Spain acquired the Falkland Islands, off the coast of modernday Argentina, from France, the local garrison put on a threeday festivity that included dramatic performances, with props and materials provided by the military governor. Theater was from the beginning a proselytizing tool. Some of the earliest attempts by Spanish missionaries to convert the natives involved the Spanish equivalent of the Passion plays and miracle plays of Western Europe. The evangelical zeal of the conquerors went to extraordinary lengths, as evidenced by the willingness of the friars to learn native languages and to present religious doctrine (often through drama) in those languages, and by the cultural syncretism between Catholicism and Indian beliefs that appears even as late as the mid-seventeenth century, in an allegorical play by the famous Mexican writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Plays brought as instruments of ideological control and religious persuasion became part of the heritage of the common people. Miracle plays can still be seen in Mexico (and in the former Mexican territories of the southwestern United States); villagewide reenactments of the Passion plays are still common 741


at Easter in many parts of Mexico and Central America; and the quasi-ritualistic moros y cristianos plays keep alive the allegorical struggle between Christians and the Moors, in mock battles and in full costume, throughout Latin America and even in the Philippines. Yet these traditional forms of Spanish theater survive primarily at the level of folk theater, and it was only in the late twentieth century that professional theater groups returned to them as sources of material and artistic expression, integrating them into a theater with a much wider audience. Theater has served as a medium for satire or social protest in Latin America since the sixteenth century, but this was not a radical departure from one of the traditional functions of theater throughout the Middle Ages either. The earliest recorded case of a playwright being punished for writing such material was that of Cristóbal de Llerena, who in 1588 was banished to the Caribbean coast of South America from Santo Domingo for having published an entremés that satirized corruption and poor government in the colony. Throughout the history of the colonies, theater played an important part in community entertainment, mainly at public holidays (such as the king’s birthday) or in pageants and festivities welcoming a new viceroy or other dignitaries. There could be private performances of the latest plays from Spain, or of works by native authors, in the courtyards or ballrooms of distinguished residents, while in streets and plazas one often found plays presented by guilds and brotherhoods and performances by Indians or Africans that reflected the variety of ethnic influences already present in the colonies. Within the first halfcentury of Spanish rule, religious plays were being performed in colleges, and occasionally the students and scholars would introduce a secular play that might merit censorship because of its content. The development of theatrical activity in the different colonies depended on the degree of encouragement or repression offered by the representatives of the crown and by the Church hierarchy. In some cases, an enlightened viceroy or captain-general would strike a deal with the bishop, by which the Church would lift its ban on theatrical performances, and box-office re742


turns would go to a needy institution such as an orphanage, a women’s hostel, or a hospital. Theater was usually presented in improvised public spaces or in a corral owned by an entrepreneur, but by the end of the eighteenth century, most principal cities of the Spanish colonies had theater houses to cater to the mestizo elite and a rising bourgeoisie. Entertainment was not necessarily the priority only of liberal governments: One of the most impressive theaters was built in Havana by Captain-General Miguel de Tacón, who headed a repressive government during the Cuban War of Independence; the Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez Francia, who virtually sealed his country from the outside world, was a devotee of culture and built a beautiful theater. The Era of Independence Drama and theatrical activity played a minor albeit interesting role in the transition to independence and in nation building. The end of the eighteenth century brought the success of the sainete (a genre made popular in Spain by Ramón de la Cruz), the characters of which were drawn from everyday contemporary society and were often social types; these characters reflected the particular social makeup of a given colony, and in the unique ethnic origins, opinions, and speech patterns presented onstage, the colonized could begin to see their own distinctive national identity. The patriotic theme was the subject of a few plays throughout Latin America, beginning in Chile, Peru, and Argentina between 1812 and 1820, then in Mexico around 1820, and eventually in Cuba and Puerto Rico beginning around mid-nineteenth century. Abdala (pb. 1869), by the Cuban patriot José Julián Martí, is an allegory of independence with an African hero, an early attack on colonialism, specifically Spanish domination of Cuba. In Argentina, on the eve of independence, one could find some rural comedies and satires of Spanish theater. In Cuba, after the remainder of Latin America was free and long before Cuba’s wars of independence (1868-1900), comedy developed through the fifty-year career of a brilliant actor and impresario, 743


Francisco Covarrubias, the author of several dozen comedies that laid the foundation of Cuban theater. (The texts were lost; only records of the performances remain.) Costumbrismo (comedy and drama that depict social types and customs) dominated the scene in most countries, and elements of it resurfaced even in the naturalist theater of the early twentieth century. Romanticism flourished in the nineteenth century with several distinguished playwrights, such as Francisco Javier of the Dominican Republic, Alejandro Tapia y Rivera of Puerto Rico, Joaquín Lorenzo Luaces and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda of Cuba, and Carlos Bello of Chile. A theater of ideas or social and political protest appeared occasionally: Juan Bautista Alberdi wrote his dramatic satire while in exile from Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas between 1838 and 1879, and Alberto Bianchi was jailed in Mexico in 1876 for criticizing the draft in Los martirios del pueblo (pr. 1876; the people’s martyrdom). The teatro bufo of Cuba, with its stock characters, spanned a quarter century and had its counterparts in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. It, too, was an important spawning ground for impresarios, actors, musicians, and playwrights. It is interesting to note that although many of the plays elicited sympathetic responses from patriotic (anti-Spanish) audiences, many of the playwrights were opposed to independence, and that the early teatro bufo, with its comic sketches of unique freshness, gave way after independence (1900-1920) to burlesque and vaudeville similar to those of the United States. Twentieth Century Drama As the independent republics became relatively stable democracies with increasing industrialization and European immigration, the theater continued to develop along two main lines: “serious” drama that addressed grave questions and moral issues or the human condition, in a fairly traditional, formal structure; and popular theater that broached topical issues or questions of morality, lightly at best, in a satiric vein. The first sophisticated social drama emerged in the early twentieth century, with the theme of national identity still prominent, either in response to a changing historical and political 744


reality or as a new perspective on the same old problems of race and class. Historically, playwrights, like other Latin American artists and intellectuals, have been committed to their role as critics and are often involved, through their main profession (as teachers, journalists, and diplomats), in the affairs of their country. Many have used drama as a medium for expressing their commitment; a few good writers have made the stage a powerful forum for debates by characters that are often allegorical or stereotypical yet manage to move an audience and to challenge prejudice, outmoded behavior, and destructive systems. José Antonio Ramos, a leading Cuban intellectual and a diplomat, analyzed his country’s most basic conflicts, embodied in different family members whose future is tied to their large estate, in his play Tembladera (pr. 1917). The play explores intergenerational conflict and the roots of Cuba’s economic crisis; American penetration of Cuba, especially after the SpanishAmerican War, and the remnants of loyalty to Spanish tradition; and the contradictions inherent both in cultural tradition and in progress. Between 1903 and 1906, Florencio Sánchez in a similar naturalist vein attacked the prevailing assumptions about national identity and immigration in Argentina and Uruguay. His Barranca abajo (pr. 1905; Retrogression, also known as Down the Ravine, 1961) exposes the real condition of an old peasant: Changes in economic relations and control of the land strip him of his property and his dignity, leading him to suicide. La gringa (pr. 1904; The Foreign Girl, 1942) is about the daughter of Italian immigrants: Her marriage to a local youth promises a solution to the conflict between the value systems of the “old,” rural Argentina (or Uruguay) and the different austerity imposed by the newcomers. Antonio Acevedo Hernández, who was influenced by Florencio Sánchez and Russian author Maxim Gorky and by the ideas of Pyotr Kropotkin, detailed in a fairly brutal manner the degradation of the rural poor in Chile. He won the national theater prize four times in forty years with such plays as Almas perdidas (pr. 1917; lost souls, a play about the slums of Santiago), La canción rota (pr. 1921; the pauper song, about the indentured 745


farm laborer), and El arbol viejo (pr. 1928; the old tree, about young people leaving their roots and their father to go to the city). In Mexico, some of the strongest naturalist drama of the years before the revolution of 1910 was written by Federico Gamboa, who is better known as a novelist. La venganza de la gleba (pb. 1907; the revenge of the soil) is considered to be the first weighty criticism of the system that was crushing the Mexican peasant. Historical drama finds its best voice, perhaps, in Rodolfo Usigli, who in a famous “antihistorical” trilogy challenges three historical myths of Mexico: the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Corona de luz: La virgen (pr. 1963; Crown of Light, 1971); the role of Doña Marina in Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico and the martyrdom of chief Cuauhtémoc in Corona de fuego (pr. 1960; crown of fire); and the madness of Carlota, after the execution, by a Mexican firing squad, of her husband, Emperor Maximilian, in Corona de sombra (pr. 1947; Crown of Shadows, 1946). In each of the dramas, the historical characters are at once fictionalized and humanized, thus becoming keys for a new, critical understanding of three crucial periods in the formation of the modern Mexican nation: the conquest and domination of the indigenous peoples; the merging of cultures; and the emergence of the liberal republic under Benito Juárez (the historical antecedent of the revolution of 1910). An equally celebrated play of Usigli is El gesticulador (pr. 1947; the impostor), one of the earliest critiques of the political system that was established after the revolution. The play’s protagonist, a history professor, enters politics by assuming the identity of César Rubio, a revolutionary hero who disappeared during the war, but the protagonist finds that he has entered a labyrinth of lies. The protagonist is murdered by the rival candidate, a corrupt politician who was responsible for the death of the original César Rubio, and the protagonist’s death (blamed on a fanatic enemy of the revolutionary party) becomes the killer’s ticket to victory. The analogy to Julius Caesar is obvious, as Usigli takes a historical referent that to this day epitomizes the ambiguity of power and of human motivation, adapting it to illustrate 746


also the ambiguities of contemporary events. Usigli’s younger contemporary Wilberto Cantón looks critically at a turning point in the revolution in Nosotros somos dios (pr. 1965; we are God). Contemporary Drama The final four decades of the twentieth century saw terrible upheavals in Latin America: poverty, disease, hunger, natural disasters, guerrilla fighting, oppression, torture, kidnappings, hijackings, strikes, riots, wars, and the appearance of death squads, drug cartels, and massacres of indigenous peoples, all of which incited a more widespread feeling of discontent with government across the continent. Social protest and dissent met with repression, including assassinations and disappearances. Playwrights and other theater artists have come to figure prominently as agents of social and political protest, combining aesthetics with what Paulo Friere called conscientizaçao, or “conscienticization.” Building on the political theater writings of Bertolt Brecht, certain playwrights led a movement collectively known as the Theater of Revolt. So effective was this movement in challenging oppression that theater became the art form of those most frequently harassed by military governments. Playwrights were censored, arrested, and tortured; theaters were closed or even burned down by government forces. Around 1973, the year of the military coup in Chile and widespread continental unrest, theater in Latin America suffered a near-paralysis, which in some places persisted for years. Yet certain playwrights’ works have managed to persist in these horrifying periods. Socially conscious theater has flourished in Chile since the 1970’s in the work of several outstanding playwrights. Among the forerunners in this century are María Asunción Requena and Isidora Aguirre, who have written about women’s struggles, relations between whites and Indians, and class conflict; and the poet Pablo Neruda, with his Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta (pr. 1967; Splendor and Death of Joaquin Murieta, 1972), a recreation of the tragic life of Chilean prospectors in the California gold rush. Since the 1950’s, audiences have seen Egon Raúl Wolff’s carefully choreographed invasions of the bourgeoisie’s 747


comfortable space by threatening creatures from the wrong side of town in Los invasores (pr. 1964; the invaders) and in Flores de papel (pr. 1970; Paper Flowers, 1971); Jorge Díaz Gutiérrez’s neoexistentialist critiques of modern alienation, such as Réquiem para una girasol (pr. 1961; requiem for a sunflower), followed by a powerful piece on the miners of Chile, El nudo ciego (pr. 1965; the blind knot), and by the ferocious satire Topografía de un desnudo (pr. 1967; the topography of a nude), about the 1963 massacre of Brazilian peasants; and Alejandro Sievking’s critical view of political oppression in Chile in Pequeños animales abatidos (pr. 1975; small downcast animals). Social and political themes have been presented by equally sophisticated writers in other countries, especially in Argentina, which has produced some of the continent’s leading playwrights. Three excellent examples are Osvaldo Dragún, Andrés Lizárraga, and Griselda Gambaro, whose works are proof of the possibility of achieving universal appeal along with very specific messages about history, social relations, and economic questions. Dragún, active since the mid-1950’s in popular theater, has dealt with some of his country’s (and Latin America’s) most difficult themes: class relations and the malaise of youth in Y nos dijeron que éramos inmortales (pb. 1962; and they told us we were immortal); the tendency to rely on formulaic ideas to solve problems that require an original, native solution in Heroica de Buenos Aires (pr. 1966); and the power of economic pressures that can turn one into a watchdog for hire, let one die of an abscessed tooth, or kill hundreds of Africans with tainted meat for the sake of a multinational corporation’s profits in Historias para ser contadas (pr. 1957; Stories for the Theatre, 1976). Dragún has also handled a historical figure that has become a favorite of the Latin American stage, the Inca Tupac Amaru, who led a major rebellion against the Spaniards in the eighteenth century; in Tupac Amaru (pr. 1957), the tormentor is ultimately driven mad by the spiritual resistance of the physically broken and defeated hero. Lizárraga has criticized the narrowness of provincial life, the hypocrisy of Argentina’s social system, and the sentimentaliza748


tion of history as a tool of social control. Some of his best work is contained in his trilogy about the wars of independence; one play in this trilogy, Santa Juana de América (pr. 1960), is an awardwinning portrait of a female revolutionary figure, presented in a Brechtian style. Griselda Gambaro’s work is sometimes labeled Theater of Cruelty or Theater of the Absurd, because of its formal and structural similarity to European and North American works of those genres. Yet it is profoundly rooted in Argentine reality, and despite its possibilities as an art that dissects the most perverse aspects of human relationships, it points to the larger picture: that of a society whose collective psyche was already torn, by the mid-1960’s, between “Cains,” who took pleasure in asserting their power and their cruelty, and “Abels,” who suffered passively, and sometimes foolishly, through deceit and betrayal. A good example is her Los siameses (pr. 1967; The Siamese Twins, 1967). In El campo (pr. 1968; The Camp, 1970), Gambaro creates a brilliant piece of ambiguity (despite its almost mechanical workings): The title translates as “the countryside” (where the main protagonist, who controls the events, insists that the action is taking place) or as “the camp,” that is, a military camp or a concentration camp, an interpretation suggested by most of the signs (the physical appearance of the main character in his uniform, the brutal behavior by guards toward the “guests,” and the cries of pain). The irony of the play is that while its main referent is the Nazi experience of the 1930’s and 1940’s (with its possible relevance to Argentina, where so many Nazis fled after the war), its ideological structure is not entirely alien to Argentina: The climate of the “liberal democracy” shifted radically in the 1960’s, and the polarization resulted in the excesses of the 1970’s, when such concentration camps became a reality, and when the entire society began to function in ambiguous codes—the authorities denying their actions (much like the play’s protagonist), and the victims (society at large) accepting the authorities’ definition of reality. In 1977 Gambaro’s novel Ganarse la muerte (to earn one’s death) was banned and Gambaro left Argentina to live in Spain 749


and France, returning in 1980 and continuing her work as a playwright. Gambaro received a great deal of global attention with her 1973 play Información para extranjeros (wr. 1971; Information for Foreigners, 1992), which for many critics captures the spirit of “postmodernism” perfectly. The play, which is about incidents of state violence in Argentina, actually forces its audience to engage with the staged theater in a very powerful way. The play is staged in a house, with the audience broken up into small groups, each with a “guide.” The guide moves the groups through the house, opening doors and witnessing scenes within rooms. As the groups progress, the boundaries between “performance” and “reality” blur until the audience is forced to question its role in both, and come to grips with its own culpability for allowing state violence to continue. Among this generation of good writers, one should also include Eduardo Pavlovsky, a psychiatrist by profession, whose characters’ psychological makeup (often one of twisted and perverse cruelty) is usually explored in a sociopolitical context, such as the Caribbean dictatorships of François Duvalier (Papa Doc) and Rafael Trujillo, as an allegory relevant to any country. Strong social protest and revisions of history and myth are central to the works of the Colombian Enrique Buenaventura, whose plays can be a vicious indictment of class oppression, and whose Los papeles del infierno (pr. 1968; the papers of Hell) documents the terrible period of modern Colombian history known as “La Violencia” through a series of short plays about ordinary human beings caught in the whirlwind of political violence and repression. In Venezuela, José Ignacio Cabrujas and Román Chalbaud have been leading contemporary authors who also see the stage as a vehicle for questioning history and politics. Cabrujas’s work is more clearly one of protest, not merely against the corruption inherent in institutions, but also against the mechanisms that corrupt pure individuals who attain power. Although Cabrujas writes in the style of Brecht, Chalbaud has played with the soap opera, with games and rituals, and with eroticism and thus resists any easy label as a “protest” writer. 750


Sebastián Salazar Bondy of Peru wrote a series of social dramas, moving on in the early 1960’s, immediately before his death, to a unique dramatic style all his own, filled with irony and with elements of farce and popular comedy. Manuel Galich of Guatemala, an exiled member of the Arbenz government deposed in the 1953 coup, persisted in a straight theater of denunciation, tempered only by sardonic humor; Galich’s works are among the few to deal so specifically with United States involvement in Latin America. Cuban theater has always been among the most active and progressive in the Americas, with many distinguished writers and directors. Individual playwrights such as Virgilio Piñera, José Triana, Manuel Reguera Saumell, and Carlos Felipe are typical of the best, and they all treat social themes through fairly solid texts and (with the exception of Triana) largely conventional techniques. These four authors span the period immediately before and after the triumph of the revolution in 1959. Their main concerns are social; their main focus, the individual’s interaction with his or her environment (family, a slum, the effects of the revolution, institutional corruption under Fulgencio Batista), and one even finds, in Felipe’s Réquiem por Yarini (pr. 1960), a powerful portrait of a famous pimp. Triana’s works reflect society in a critical light. His chief works were created on the eve of the 1959 revolution and present darkly satiric visions of “sacred” institutions such as the Church and the family, using mythical allusion and ritual devices that sometimes make his work very reminiscent of that of French playwright Jean Genet. In fact, his award-winning La noche de los asesinos (pr. 1966; The Criminals, 1967), in which three young people enact their parents’ murder, bears a strong resemblance to Genet’s Les Bonnes (pr. 1947; The Maids, 1954). Puerto Rican drama has found its finest expression in the works of a number of authors since the 1950’s. Francisco Arriví tackled such difficult subjects as racism, the role of the intellectual (at a time when intellectuals were highly vulnerable because of their pro-independence views), and the complexes that 751


beset the Puerto Rican psyche. Arriví’s best-known work perhaps is his trilogy that includes Vejigantes (pr. 1957; mummers). René Marqués pursued political themes more aggressively, always obsessed with the nature of Puerto Rican identity as a culture and as a nation. His La carreta (pr. 1952; The Oxcart, 1969) has become a classic portrayal of the migration of Puerto Ricans, from the country to San Juan to New York and a life of continued economic hardship compounded by social problems such as drugs and prostitution. Modern Genres and Themes The great majority of theatergoers in Latin America continue to flock to lighter fare, to comedy, and to musicals. The tradition of the género chico is uninterrupted: The comedy of social customs, the farce, and the musical comedy or review have always been the mainstay. In the traveling carpas (tents) of Mexico and the southwestern United States and in the sainete criollo (Argentine version of the Spanish sainete, with tangos and social types from Buenos Aires), in the prolific production of the Alhambra Theatre of Havana (where some of Cuba’s best playwrights and musicians exercised their profession), and of other locales around the continent where vaudeville coexisted with good, solid comic drama, and in far more reputable playhouses, such as the San Martín municipal theater of Buenos Aires, literally thousands of scripted plays have entertained millions. Many of the best playwrights still work in that style, while a great many also combine elements of this popular tradition with European conventions à la Georges Feydeau or Noël Coward (adapted to Latin American culture). Even in revolutionary Cuba, the comedia musical has thrived through the pen of such good playwrights as Héctor Quintero and José Brene. Among authors who have worked on psychological drama or fantasy, certain popular names stand out: Conrado Nalé Roxlo and Carlos Gorostiza of Argentina; Celestino Gorostiza, Xavier Villaurrutia, Salvador Novo, Carlos Solórzano, Elena Garro, Maruxa Vilalta, Luisa Josefina Hernández, and Rafael Solana of Mexico; Isaac Chocrón of Venezuela; and Elena Portocarrero and Julio Ortega of Peru. Many, influenced by Eugene 752


O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, have sought to create characters of great psychological complexity, while others have created outright fantasies in which the characters play in dreamworlds. Collective Creations and Political Performance The 1960’s brought with its revolutionary politics a corresponding movement in the theater. Much as the workers’ theater of the 1930’s and 1940’s and the popular theater (the products of the Mexican revolution in the 1910’s and Fray Mocho in Argentina in the 1950’s) had gone out in search of their audience, many of the young actors, directors, and writers in the 1960’s chose to place their craft at the service of the revolution. Following the example of Fray Mocho and Augusto Boal in Brazil, and Enrique Buenaventura and Santiago García in Colombia, dozens of theater groups established themselves in strategic relationship to the communities that they wished to serve and to “conscientize” (educate toward liberation). The internal process of each group was revolutionized, with collective sharing of responsibilities and with collective creation becoming the most significant single change in playwriting in centuries. Buenaventura, for example, gave up individual playwriting to become an equal member of the collective that he had founded in Cali. A number of groups (such as El Aleph of Chile, Libre Teatro Libre of Argentina, and Grupo Escambray of Cuba) produced quality plays through this method. In a few cases, groups of playwrights collaborated on a single play, the most famous example perhaps being El avión negro (pr. 1970), a satire about Juan Perón’s return to Argentina, coauthored by Roberto Cossa, Carlos Somigliana, Ricardo Talesnik, and Germán Rozenmacher, all distinguished Argentine playwrights. Collective creation caught on particularly in the community-based theater groups, whose interest was mostly in theater as an instrument of education and social change; Latino theater groups in the United States (particularly in the Chicano groups through their association TENAZ) have been active promoters of the process to this day. Its limitations have been amply demon753


strated, however, in the quality of the texts produced, and it has become clear that a good, strong playwright is necessary to produce the end product of a collective process. Another of the “Three B’s” of Latin American Theater (along with Brecht and Buenaventura) is Augusto Boal. Boal has explored the relationship between politics and performance possibly more intimately than any other contemporary theorist. In 1971, Boal was arrested, tortured, and exiled: Even during his imprisonment he continued writing, and his play Torquemada (pb. 1972) is an autobiographical account of those events, in which he compares his torturers to those who participated in the Spanish Inquisition. Boal’s book Teatro del oprimado y otras poéticas políticas (1974; The Theatre of the Oppressed, 1979) is now included as standard reading for most advanced theater theorists. Boal as a director engaged in a variety of experiments to create the revolutionary theater he envisioned: These experiments blurred fantasy and reality, creating unexpected theater in unusual places, such as restaurants, to demonstrate the freedom of the individual. Community-based groups continued to flourish in the 1980’s despite political and economic difficulties. The movement has flourished in Cuba and Nicaragua in particular, where it receives considerable official support, with hundreds of amateur and semiprofessional groups from which talented individuals are routinely singled out for professional training. Latino Theater in North America Latino theater in the United States grew impressively during the last decades of the twentieth century, a result primarily of two factors: the immigration of large numbers of Cubans and Puerto Ricans to the New York area and the growth of community movements among the Chicano population. Many Cuban and Puerto Rican artists, actors, and writers moved to New York in the mid-1960’s and assumed an active role in the cultural life of the city, founding theater groups and workshops and boosting the activity of such pioneering groups as the Puerto Rican Travelling Theatre. It became possible to attend different Spanish-language theater performances every 754


night of the week in New York, ranging from Spanish classics to Latin American repertory to original works by local authors. The Chicano movement in California in the 1960’s grew out of the civil rights and the farmworkers’ movements. El Teatro Campesino sprang directly from agitprop work with César Chávez’s organization and from experience with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Teatro de la Esperanza and, later, other community-based groups developed along similar lines. Teatro Nacional de Aztlán continues to exist, with more than one hundred member groups from all over the United States, with links to Mexican theater; in these links it has restored a relationship that had existed well into the twentieth century between the theaters of the United States and Mexico, through the Mexican companies that toured the American Southwest and California. The Chicano and other community theaters tend to use original material or adaptations of repertory and classics, and some individual authors, such as Luis Miguel Valdez, have moved into the mainstream with works that deal with the Mexican American experience and culture. The work of Valdez with El Teatro Campesino, stunningly visual and powerful, reaches back to the performance rituals of pre-Columbian Aztec cultures, thus ideologically and politically separating itself from the European conquerors. In addition, his work clearly associates the Anglodominated U.S. government with the Spanish imperialists. The community theaters have established good working relationships with Chicano studies programs at various universities, through which Chicano theater has become legitimatized as a subject of research and scholarship. Among the most popular of modern Mexican American theater artists since the 1990’s is Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a poet and playwright as well as actor, and regular commentator on National Public Radio (NPR). His work, along with that of Coco Fusco, emphasizes the multiple ethnicities of American culture and attempts to dissolve borders between identities. His performances use modern imagery of supersophisticated technology combined with ancient Aztec iconography, creating bizarre hybrid characters like El Mexterminator, Cyber-Vato, and El Naftazteca. 755


Theater festivals continue to bring groups, directors, writers, and critics together. Now these festivals are held not only in Manizales, Colombia, in Havana, in Mexico, or in Caracas, but also in New York, in Montreal, and in other North American cities. Latin American theater has overcome the balkanization that plagued it for centuries, as it plagued all former Spanish colonies: Since the 1960’s, writers and directors, companies, and scholars of different countries have met and shared their work and their experience. The historical tie between the Latino culture of the United States and the cultures of Latin America is being restored, thanks in part to the theater. — Judith A. Weiss, updated by Michael M. Chemers Learn More Albuquerque, Severino J. Violent Acts: A Study of Contemporary Latin American Theatre. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1991. Provides an extremely useful, if disturbing, model for uniting twentieth century Latin American “Theater of Revolt” across many countries and cultures by pointing out the recurring themes of riot, murder, assassination, and state-sponsored torture. Allen, Richard F. Teatro hispanoamericano: Una bibliografia anotada (Spanish American Theatre: An Annotated Bibliography). Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Allen’s guide is a good place to start when searching for materials on this subject. It is superior to some earlier versions because of the content and usefulness of its notations, which give the reader some idea of where a particular listing will lead. Dauster, Frank N. Historia del teatro hispanoamericano: Siglos XIX y XX. Mexico City, Mexico: Ediciones de Andrea, 1966. An early work by one of the established writers of the field, this work is generally held to be a comprehensive history of the era, although now dated. An important text for pre-1960’s drama but not to be considered alone, especially if researching pre-Columbian performance roots. In Spanish. _______, ed. Perspectives on Contemporary Spanish American Theatre. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1996. Dauster is one of the most respected writers in the field and here he 756


has assembled some excellent essays to help provide several good models for analyzing recent Latino drama. Gardner, Joseph L., ed. Mysteries of the Ancient Americas. Pleasantville, N.Y.: Reader’s Digest Association, 1986. Assembled by the editors at Reader’s Digest, this is a good first book for those who are just beginning to study pre-Columbian America. Full of lush photographs and artwork, this book has great information about the performance rituals of the Aztecs and other indigenous peoples, and explores how those traditions merged with medieval and modern ones under Spanish influence. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century. San Francisco, Calif.: City Lights Books, 1996. Winner of the American Book Award, a collection of satirical dramatic texts as well as essays and poems by the border-busting artist. At turns funny and thoughtprovoking, Gómez-Peña is one of the most prominent inheritors and innovators of the Latino “Theater of Revolt” tradition, linking modern hip-hop Anglo-American culture and ancient Aztec religion in a fascinating mix. Huerta, Jorge A. Chicano Drama: Performance, Society, and Myth. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Using informative biographies of playwrights and analyses of their plays, discusses the way in which Chicano and Chicana dramatists negotiate cultural differences. Weiss, Judith A., and Leslie Damasceno. Latin American Popular Theatre: The First Five Centuries. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. Focuses on such specific topics as the urban theater; popular forms, characters, and ideology; theater in the 1960’s; and new trends in drama from the region. Woodyard, George W., and Leon F. Lyday, eds. Dramatists in Revolt. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976. Although this is an older book, it has taken its place as one of the fundamental texts for understanding antigovernment theatrical traditions in Latin America.

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atino fiction presents the experience and multiplicity of perspectives unique to Latinos—residents of the United States whose cultural, ethnic, and linguistic ties to Latin America connect them as members of a distinct yet multiethnic community. The principal Latino ethnic or cultural groups include Chicanos, or Mexican Americans; Puerto Rican Americans; Cuban Americans; and residents or citizens of the United States who trace their origins to other countries in Central or South America. Each of these constituent groups is distinct in its own right, with its own history, folklore, and traditions. However, they all share commonalities of language, culture, religion, experience, and values; these attributes distinguish Latino culture both from the dominant Anglo culture of the United States and from those of other immigrant populations. Much Latino long fiction is characterized by a sense of ethnicity and by the portrayal of ethnic experience. Mexican American/Chicano Long Fiction In 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded all Mexican territories north of the Rio Grande to the United States. One year later, all former citizens of Mexico who still resided in the area automatically became U.S. citizens. These people were a diverse group engendered principally from a mixture of European, Aztec, and Native North Americans; from each ethnocultural wellspring the group derived myths, values, religious and cultural traditions, laws, and literary models. In the ensuing years the overlay of Anglo influence enriched the mixture. The resulting culture came to call itself Chicano, a term used to designate the distinct history, culture, and literature of the American Southwest. Chicano long fiction, like Chicano language and culture generally, derives from three distinct sociohistorical sources: Mexican Indian, predominant prior to 1519; Spanish Mexican, predominant from 1519 to 1848; and Anglo, emergent after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. These 758

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sources provide a richness of myth, legend, history, and literary models and techniques, both oral and written, from which Chicano writers have drawn inspiration and material, the reactions to which have constituted the conflicts and tensions that drive all forms of Chicano literary expression. Chicano long fiction is multilingual, employing Spanish, English, and Pocho, a hybrid blend of linguistic elements. Used together, these language options allow the Chicano novelist to express the full range of his or her experience, encompassing the dominant Anglo culture, the culture of origin, and the culture of the home and the barrio. Chicano novelists are conscious of their linguistic and ethnic heritage and depict a people proud of their history and culture, aware of their uniqueness, and committed to preserving their familial, social, and literary traditions. Their novels portray men and women who accept themselves as they are and resist pressures to become more closely aligned with the mainstream Anglo culture that threatens to Americanize them. Proximity to Mexico and movement both north and south across the border continually reinforce the Hispanic and mestizo ways, creating a cultural dynamic, unique to Chicano literature, which continues to influence the Chicano novel’s vital, energetic, and creative momentum. The first significant Chicano novelist was José Antonio Villarreal. His Pocho (1959) was the first Latino novel issued by a major publishing firm, and it is frequently regarded as the first work of real literary or historical value to reflect the Chicano experience. The protagonist is a boy who seeks self-discovery, but as a Chicano he also must decide which of the ideals, traditions, and attitudes of his parents to reject in favor of Anglo ones he likes. Though sometimes criticized for not placing appropriate emphasis on racial and cultural issues, Pocho remains an important work in Latino fiction. Richard Vásquez’s Chicano (1970), like Pocho, has been criticized for its failure to depict the Chicano experience realistically, but in its portrayal of Chicano themes, the novel constitutes a seminal work. Raymond Barrio’s The Plum Plum Pickers (1969) exposes the harshness of social and economic life for migrant Mexican and Chicano farmworkers in Southern California. Its literary excellence, the richness of its 759

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narrative technique, and its realistic depiction of the difficulties faced by Chicano laborers have earned it an important place in the evolution of Chicano fiction. The novelists who represent the emergence into maturity and international acknowledgment of the Chicano novel include Rudolfo Anaya, Rolando Hinojosa, Ron Arias, and Sandra Cisneros. The critical acclaim accorded these novelists has established them as major twentieth century artists and has drawn attention to the genre of Latino fiction. Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972) uses dream sequences, Magical Realism, and mythological echoes to approach the fantastic. The novel’s protagonist, through the agency of a folk healer named Ultima, achieves a level of spiritual and perceptual experience that awakens his awareness of the mythological figures of his Chicano heritage, teaching him respect for folk wisdom and custom and leading him to an alternate reality which, by extension, becomes available to the reader as well. The novel, widely read and critically acclaimed, established Anaya as a major force in American letters. Rolando Hinojosa was the first Chicano writer to win an important international literary award. He was also the first U.S. citizen to be honored by the Casa de las Américas panel. His novel Klail City y sus alrededores (1976; Klail City: A Novel, 1987) was the second book in a trilogy that re-creates the reality, beliefs, and vision shared by generations of members of the Spanishspeaking community in south Texas, where Hinojosa was born. The other two volumes of the trilogy are Estampas del valle, y otras obras/ Sketches of the Valley and Other Works (1973; English revision, The Valley, 1983) and Claros varones de Belken (1986; Fair Gentlemen of Belken County). Hinojosa creates a collage of points of view, personalities, landscape snapshots, spots of time, and events both trivial and sublime that establish a palpable, vital fictional world through which a powerful sense of identity and continuity surges. Hinojosa suggested that he wrote the trilogy to help himself keep alive a past that grew in importance as it became more remote; in doing so, he has also made the Latino experience immediate and accessible to a broad spectrum of readers. Ron Arias’s The Road to Tamazunchale (1975) reveals the influ760

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ence of contemporary international literary currents. The emphasis on the subjective, internal reality of his protagonist, rather than on the exterior world of objects, is consistent with the emphases of many other modern novelists. The effect of this emphasis on alternative reality is to diminish the narrative distance between writer and reader by smearing the distinctions within the novel between illusion and reality. Arias’s mastery of contemporary literary technique and his emphasis in the novel on the barrio experience, the problems of illegal Mexican immigrants in the United States, and the rejection of victimhood in favor of empowerment make The Road to Tamazunchale unique in the body of Latino fiction, perhaps setting a new standard for the Chicano novel. Sandra Cisneros is one of an emerging group of Chicano writers who have graduated from a creative writing program; her novel The House on Mango Street (1984) was completed during her tenure as a National Foundation of the Arts Fellow, and it received the Before Columbus American Book Award in 1985. Employing fragmentation and montage, she depicts not only the Chicano experience from the unusual perspective of growing up in the Midwest among predominantly Puerto Rican Americans but also the emergence of her self-awareness as a writer and creator. Like Hinojosa, Cisneros admits a need to recapture the past in order to fulfill the needs of the present. Puerto Rican Long Fiction The population of Puerto Rico is a blend of the cultures and races of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. From 1493 until 1898, Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony. Puerto Rican fiction assumed a mestizo identity, in opposition to Spanish pressures to assimilate; this emphasis evolved to reflect a more Latin American character in the twentieth century, when Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory. After World War II, almost a third of the island’s population immigrated to the United States, dispersed to points as far apart as Hawaii and New York. This distribution complicated the process whereby Puerto Ricans sought to define and protect their cultural and literary identity. Furthermore, by physically separating family and community members, 761

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the immigration reduced the efficacy of the oral tradition as a means of propagating values and traditions, making long fiction the culture’s principal mechanism for articulating its vision of its own reality. The language of the Puerto Rican American novel reflects the diversity of Puerto Rican ethnic and linguistic origins, a product of the melding of European (Spanish, French), African, and Native American cultures overlaid with an American patina. Puerto Rican American fiction has retained diverse elements of myth, culture, and value structures. Most Puerto Rican American fiction is bilingual, and it employs grammatical elements and vocabulary of the Caribbean patois and the Native American elements of its linguistic heritage. The development of Puerto Rican literature has been constituted in part by a series of reactions. The reaction of nineteenth century Puerto Rican artists to Spanish dominance was to create a sense of identity that emphasized the values and linguistic elements of the indigenous, African, and mestizo aspects of its cultural heritage. From 1898 to about 1940, Americanizing pressures prompted Puerto Rican writers to emphasize the Spanish language itself and to use Latin American models in their efforts to define and protect their identity as a separate culture. Finally, since the end of World War II and in reaction to the new assimilating forces following the surge in emigration of the 1940’s and 1950’s, the efforts to preserve their cultural autonomy have increasingly led Puerto Ricans away from idealized depictions of the island and toward settings in New York, Chicago, and other enclaves of Puerto Rican American cultural influence. The long fiction of the late twentieth century, written by the children of first-generation working-class immigrants, criticizes the complacency of an Americanized middle class as well as the oppressive dominance of Anglo culture. Typical of this class is Pedro Juan Soto’s novel Spiks (1956), which emphasizes the anguish of the impoverished immigrants and looks wistfully back to an idyllic past. Another novelist who focused on the oppression and alienation of the Puerto Rican American in New York was José Luis González, with En Nueva York y otras desgracias 762

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(1973; in New York and other disgraces). Critics have come to regard these novels as reactionary, creating a distorted, idealized view of the reality that existed before American involvement in Puerto Rico and reflecting a skewed, one-dimensional image of Puerto Rican American life, focusing only on the tragedy, alienation, and exploitation of immigrants at the mercy of a cold and greedy America. New York Puerto Rican writers of the late twentieth century were writing mostly in English and had inherited a popular tradition heavily influenced by Hispanic folklore and the multifaceted culture of one of the world’s largest cities. Thematically and structurally their work has much in common with African American, Third World, and other Latino writers seeking identity through recognition of their multiethnicity rather than through acquiescence to pressures to assimilate. Nicholasa Mohr, one of the most productive and critically acclaimed Puerto Rican American novelists, deemphasizes the theme of alienation, creating characters who are not overly conscious of cultural conflict or crises of identity. Felita (1979) and Rituals of Survival: A Woman’s Portfolio (1985) are examples of this fiction of selfdetermination. Cuban American Long Fiction Cuban literary influence in the United States can be traced to the early 1800’s, when José Martí and other patriots worked from the United States for Cuban independence. After Fidel Castro’s 1959 victory in the Cuban Revolution and the large-scale emigration that followed, however, Cuban Americans emerged as a major contributing force to Latino culture and literature. Unlike Puerto Ricans, Cubans came as refugees rather than immigrants. Furthermore, although Cuba had been a U.S. protectorate since 1898, it was never a political colony of the United States in the same sense as Puerto Rico. At the time of the Cuban Revolution, then, Cuban writers, having felt no assimilationist pressure, had developed no literary expressions of defiance or protection against the imposition of mainstream American culture onto Cuban American identity. In fact, because it was sparked by a political and social revolution, the emigration involved a cross763

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section of Cuban society: workers, middle-class service personnel, professionals, intellectuals, and the wealthy. Many subsequently adapted to and became a part of U.S. and Hispanic mainstream culture. The fiction of Cuban Americans in the 1960’s was primarily written in Spanish. One reason may be that the audience targeted by these first-generation exiles was primarily Spanishspeaking, either Cuban or Latin American. Another reason may be found in the essentially political, often propagandistic nature of the material. The themes were less concerned with discovery and preservation of an ethnic, cultural, or literary identity than with criticizing Cuba’s communist economic and political system. Therefore, the Cuban American novel of the 1960’s was almost devoid of the kinds of ethnic and linguistic self-consciousness that marked Chicano, Puerto Rican, and other minority ethnic fiction. Fiction written by Cuban American novelists of the 1970’s was less preoccupied with exile and looking back to the island past than with meeting the demands of the Cuban American communities then flourishing in the United States. Their novels were dominated by English, although code-switching (changing languages when expression in one seems richer or clearer than in the other) became more frequent, as did representation of a Cuban dialect heavily influenced by American idioms. Cuban American novelists of the late twentieth century have more in common with other Latino writers than did their forerunners of the 1950’s and 1960’s, having sought solidarity with the Latino community of writers and thinkers rather than returning to another, or remaining distinct as exiles. Immigration from Cuba continues to reinforce the dynamic nature of this evolution, however, and to provide an impetus resisting assimilation. The first Cuban American novels, which began to be published in 1960, almost exclusively attacked Marxist doctrine in general and the political manifestation of it in the Cuban Revolution in particular. The first such novel, Enterrado vivo (1960; buried alive), written by Andrés Rivera Collado, was published in Mexico; the ensuing decade saw similar novels, published in the United States and abroad. At worst, these works were openly 764

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propagandistic and inflammatory, while at best they were unrealistically and ineffectively nostalgic in their idealization of prerevolutionary Cuba. A change in direction for Cuban American fiction was initiated by Celedonio González, whose focus in Los primos (1971) was on Cuban life and culture in the United States. The thematic emphasis in González’s subsequent novels, Los cuatro embajadores (1973; the four ambassadors) and El espesor del pellejo de un gato ya cadáver (1978; the thickness of the skin of a cat that is already a cadaver), is on the cultural and social conflicts experienced by Cuban Americans in a predatory economic system that keeps immigrants disadvantaged and alienated in order to exploit them. Like other Latino fiction, these novels depict a people not fully Americanized but clearly unable to return to or participate fully in their land or culture of origin. Cristina García’s work seeks resolution of the tensions between first and subsequent generations of Cuban Americans; born in 1958 in Havana, she grew up in New York City and was educated at Barnard College and The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Her first novel, Dreaming in Cuban (1992), earned favorable critical reception and became widely popular. Neither strident nor nostalgic, the novel avoids romantic excess, depicting a search for cultural and personal identity. In the novels of Oscar Hijuelos, the evolution of Cuban American fiction moved even closer to integration in the American mainstream. He was born in New York in 1951, and neither Hijuelos nor his parents were exiles. Their experience, and his, is more consistent with that of Chicano and Puerto Rican American writers who lack the political agenda of writers in exile and whose thematic emphasis is on discovery and preservation of the integrity of their cultural and linguistic legacy. His first novel, Our House in the Last World (1983), is autobiographical, though often classified as a novel. He won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for fiction; further evidence of his acceptance by mainstream America was the adaptation of his second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), for film by Warner Bros. — Andrew B. Preslar 765

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Learn More Baker, Houston A., Jr., ed. Three American Literatures: Essays in Chicano, Native American, and Asian American Literature for Teachers of American Literature. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1982. A collection of critical essays for students and general readers, offering historical and traditional critical perspectives. Overview essays direct students to subjects of further study. Chapters include notes and references. Behar, Ruth, ed. Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. For students and general readers with literary interests, this collection of essays, poems, drawings and stories by Cuban and Cuban American writers and scholars explores issues of culture, language, and national identity. Excellent resource for understanding the Latino search for ideological solidarity. Christie, John S. Latino Fiction and the Modernist Imagination: Literature of the Borderlands. New York: Garland, 1998. Examines the works of Cuban Americans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans, among others. Includes thirteen pages of bibliographical references, as well as an index. Gish, Robert Franklin. Beyond Bounds: Cross-Cultural Essays on Anglo, American Indian, and Chicano Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. An insightful exploration of the interrelationships of myth, language, and literary traditions of the overlapping cultures of the American Southwest. Horno-Delgado, Anunción, et al., eds. Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writings and Critical Readings. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. Focusing on the experience of Hispanic female writers from all ethnic and cultural backgrounds, this collection of critical essays on fiction, poetry, and linguistics offers explanatory, introductory, and analytical studies of issues relating to all aspects and genres of Latina literary production. Scholarly but accessible, with notes and a bibliography. Marqués, René. The Docile Puerto Rican. Translated with an introduction by Barbara Bockus Aponte. Philadelphia: Temple 766

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University Press, 1976. Essays written for young Puerto Ricans to help them understand their cultural, ideological, and historical legacy. Treats issues of national identity directly and clearly, focusing on language, art, and literature. Endnotes offer explanation but are not intrusive or obscure; index and bibliography direct the student to further reading. Robinson, Cecil. Mexico and the Hispanic Southwest in American Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977. Appropriate for a general audience, this book offers an excellent historical perspective on the evolution of culture and literature in the American Southwest. An introduction and prologue provide context and focus. Contains illustrations, an epilogue, unobtrusive references by chapter and page, a bibliography, and an index. Shirley, Carl R., and Paula W. Shirley. Understanding Chicano Literature. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. An introduction helps focus the material of the chapters following: poetry, theater, the novel, short fiction, and more, with notes, bibliography, index, and a list of suggested readings. Dense with information; appropriate for high school seniors and above. Steele, Cynthia. Politics, Gender, and the Mexican Novel, 1968-1988: Beyond the Pyramid. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. A thoughtful study of contemporary Mexican long fiction. Discusses politics, social problems, sex roles, and female characters.

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nherent in the ideology underlying the conquest and colonization of Latin America were certain factors that severely retarded the development of the novel there. Notable among them was the Church’s view that the novel form was harmful to morals, coupled with the vision of Latin America as a mission field, from which such negative influences could and should be excluded. Thus, in 1531, it was forbidden for books such as Amadís de Gaula (1508; Amadis of Gaul, partial translation, 1567, 1803; better known as Amadís) to be imported. While it is true that from 1580 on, all sorts of fiction did enter the region—and it even appears that a sizable portion of the first edition of Miguel de Cervantes’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615; The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant, Don Quixote of the Mancha, 1612-1620; better known as Don Quixote de la Mancha) came to the New World—the law is indicative of an attitude that, in the Spanish-speaking regions, successfully prevented the production of anything that might properly be called a novel until 1816. In Brazil, the attempt to exclude the form was not so successful. It was, in fact, a churchman who produced the first novel there. Four years after the publication of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come (1678, 1684; more commonly known as The Pilgrim’s Progress), the Jesuit Alexandre de Gusmão (1628-1724) published História do predestinado peregrino e seu irmão Precito (1682). Also in the allegorical mode is the Compêndio narrativo do peregrino da América (1728), by Nuno Marques Pereira (1652-1728), and in 1752, Teresa Margarida da Silva e Orta published Aventuras de Diófanes. These attempts to turn the form to the service of morality left no progeny, and when the Brazilian novel returned, it was in the fullness of the Romantic movement. The outstanding Brazilian novelist of the Romantic period was José de Alencar (1829-1877), whose early work consists of a series of sentimental novels of adventure, dealing particularly with the idealized Indian, modeled on Chateaubriand’s noble 768


savage, who predominated throughout Latin American literature in this era. Alencar’s more mature works, including Lucíola (1862), Iracema (1865; Iracema, the Honey-Lips: A Legend of Brazil, 1886), and Senhora (1875; Senhora: Profile of a Woman, 1994), are more concerned with the portrayal of urban society, as is the notable Memórias de um sargento de milícias (1854; Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant, 1959), by Manuel António de Almeida (1831-1861), which concentrates on Rio de Janeiro. At the same time, Bernardo Guimarães (1825-1884) was dealing with nationalistic themes. The Nineteenth Century The first novel of Spanish America, as well, appeared within the politically liberal orientation of nascent Romanticism. With the accession of the Bourbons to the Spanish throne in 1700, considerable French influence began entering the colonies, and the Enlightenment left its mark on their literature. José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776-1827), known as “The Mexican Thinker,” was fundamentally a pamphleteer and essayist who traveled with a portable printing press, turning out material in support of the war of independence. His first novel, El periquillo sarniento (1816; The Itching Parrot, 1912), was, appropriately, a statement of reason at the same time that it led to a current of Romantic novels in the region. Although the picaresque genre in Spain had been an instrument of the Church, useful in the preaching of morality, Lizardi’s picaresque novel is brutally anticlerical even while its entertaining narrative is marred by lengthy sermons. This tendency toward essay in the novel perhaps had its roots in the missionary traditions of the colonies and has continued to the present day, particularly in the fiction of the Mexican Carlos Fuentes. In the Mexican novel, there is also a tendency to employ circular structures, which are already visible in Lizardi’s work. Each episode presents the reader with a turn of the Wheel of Fortune, as the protagonist becomes successful only to end in desperate straits again. The vast majority of Latin America’s nineteenth century novels appeared in the second half of that century, although one notable work spans nearly a half century in itself: Cecilia Valdés 769


(first part 1839, completed 1882; Cecilia Valdés: A Novel of Cuban Customs, 1962), by the Cuban author Cirilo Villaverde (18121894). Like nearly all fiction following the attainment of independence by most of Latin America (although not yet by Cuba), Cecilia Valdés is Romantic in character; following the example set by Lizardi, Villaverde’s is a political Romanticism, relatively unconcerned with nature. The Latin American short story has its roots in the celebrated narrative “El matadero,” by Esteban Echeverría (1805-1851). Another work of doubtful genre in the same era, Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga (1845; Facundo: Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants: Or, Civilization and Barbarism, 1868), by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888), exercised considerable influence on the course of the novel for decades to come. A combination of biography, novel, and essay, it establishes with its subtitle the theme of the struggle between the relatively sophisticated, often Europeanized, cities of Latin America and the more barbaric outlying areas, be they the Argentine pampas or the Venezuelan llanos. In general terms, the novel of the nineteenth century tends to contrast the refinement of Europe with the crudeness of the New World. The sons of Brazilian planters, for example, received the finest education that Europe could offer, often returning to bewail their homeland’s lack of culture. The most prominent of a number of novels written in opposition to the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas was Amalia (first part 1851, second part 1855; Amalia: A Romance of the Argentine, 1919), by José Mármol (1817-1871), who learned his craft from Sir Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas, père. In his struggle against injustice, Mármol’s Daniel Bello is the prototype of the Romantic hero, while the heroine Amalia is representative of European refinement surrounded by New World vulgarity. In this era, many novels were serialized in newspapers, among them Amalia, which exhibits the episodic character of this type of composition. Probably the most widely read Latin American novel of the nineteenth century was María (1867; María: A South American Romance, 1890), by Jorge Isaacs (1837-1895). At this stage, the Romantics were generally more concerned with nature, and the 770


heroine of Isaacs’s novel appears to be almost a projection of the landscape of Colombia’s Cauca Valley. The tale is typical of the novels of its day, involving an encounter of soul mates who are separated and then reunited at the conclusion, only to learn that fate has made their marriage impossible. In this case, the couple are brother and sister by adoption, and her death prevents their marriage. A variation on the theme appears in Cumandá (1879), by the Ecuadoran Juan León Mera (1832-1894): After the lovers have overcome many obstacles, the proposed marriage is prevented by the revelation that the couple are brother and sister, separated in infancy. In Cumandá, Mera lays the foundations for the modern novel of protest against the inhuman treatment of Indians, concerning whom he has solid documentary knowledge. In 1889, the same type of novel, overlaid with European sentimentalism and full of fateful coincidences and melodramatic surprises, including the usual impossible marriage of siblings, appeared in Peru under the title Aves sin nido (Birds Without a Nest: A Story of Indian Life and Priestly Oppression in Peru, 1904). The author, Clorinda Matto de Turner (1852-1909), wrote a preface within the tradition of the moralistic essay, declaring that her purpose in writing was to exhibit the unjust treatment of the Peruvian Indian and argue for the marriage of priests. It is a prime example of the nineteenth century Romantic novel in that it is far more concerned with theme than with technique. Nevertheless, it exercised a powerful influence in Latin America. Cuban-born Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873) published her novel Sab (English translation, 1993) in 1841, with a black slave as protagonist, anticipating by nearly a century the handful of novels that would attempt to set black people’s situation in relief. More significant is her Guatimozín (1846; Cuauhtemoc, the Last Aztec Emperor: An Historical Novel, 1898), a wellresearched historical novel dealing with the conquest of Mexico and one of the two most important of that genre in the century, the other being Durante la reconquista (1897), by Alberto Blest Gana (1831-1920). French literary influences gradually gained momentum throughout Latin America in the nineteenth century, and crit771


ics are often hard-pressed to identify the tendency to which a given writer or work belongs. It is preferable to point out that while Romantic tendencies underlie nearly all the novelistic production of the region until 1880 or so, writers were beginning to feel the influence first of Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola and then of the Parnassian and Symbolist movements, and to experiment with them. In Brazil, Inocência (1872; Innocencia: A Story of the Prairie Regions of Brazil, 1889), by Alfredo de Escragnolle Tarmay (1843-1899), represents something of a transition from the dominance of Romanticism to realism in that country. The well-known Martín Rivas (1862; English translation, 1916), by Blest Gana, is illustrative of his desire to become the Balzac of Chile, although at its base it is still a Romantic work rather than a realistic one. It has, in fact, been termed the best example of “Romantic realism” in Latin America, and it exhibits the typical polarity that is so evident in the novels of this period: city against country, reality against appearances, good characters against evil ones. The Mexican writer Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (1834-1893) attempted to raise the quality of the Latin American novel by urging his fellow authors to read widely in order to gain a more universal literary vision, something that Lizardi and others had already been doing. Although an Indian himself, and desirous of making the novel more realistic, he tended to produce romantically stereotyped characters, Indian or otherwise, and failed to plead the Indian’s case strongly. His Clemencia (1869) and La Navidad en las Montañas (1870; Christmas in the Mountains, 1961) are worthy novels, but his considerable ability to tell a good adventure story is best displayed in El Zarco: Episodios de la vida Mexicana en 1861-1863 (1901; El Zarco, the Bandit, 1957), in which he attempts to break with Romanticism yet employs as an omen an owl in the tree where his title character is to be hanged. There are two couples, one positive and the other negative, the one illustrating what is good for Mexico and the other illustrating what threatens to destroy it. About 1880, the call of writers such as Altamirano bore fruit, for there was at that time a considerable increase in both the quantity and the quality of Latin American fiction, correspond772


ing, perhaps coincidentally, to the emergence of naturalistic tendencies. These were mixed with what remained of Romanticism and realism, the best of which led to the regionalist novel as the writer became increasingly preoccupied with accurately describing the circumstances on the land. Costumbrismo, as the term indicates, involves the more or less superficial portrayal of types and customs in a given region. The term criollismo is related, but the criollista writer is more deeply involved in the subject of study. In the last two decades of the century, these tendencies became mixed with the emerging Modernismo, whose most powerful impetus was provided by the publication in 1888 of Azul, a collection of short stories and poems by Rubén Darío (1867-1916). Modernismo in the Spanish-speaking countries (in contrast to the modernism of Brazil) was a truly indigenous movement, the roots of which, however, were in French Parnassianism and Symbolism. Modernismo is a movement characterized by refined sensibilities, even hyperaestheticism, and in contrast to criollismo’s desire to come to grips with Latin American reality, its aim in general was to rise above it in a manner of escape. It left its mark on prose fiction in a greater concern on the part of the writer for sound artistic accomplishment and in an increase in the use of imagery in prose style, issuing ultimately in some novels that must be read almost as poetry on account of the intensity of their language. In the Spanish-speaking countries, the leading exponent of naturalism is probably Eugenio Cambacérès (1843-1890), whose Música sentimental (1884), while clearly influenced by Zola, still exhibits realistic tendencies. In Mexico, the most prominent of those deeply influenced by naturalism was Federico Gamboa (1864-1939), a careful artist whose most important works are Suprema ley (1896) and Santa (1903). The latter was more successful than any Mexican book up to its time and strongly influenced the later prominent Mexican novelist Mariano Azuela (1873-1952). Gamboa’s principles are drawn from French naturalism, but his work serves as a bridge between the Romantic realism of the nineteenth century and the regionalism of the twentieth. Another Mexican novelist, Emilio Rabasa (1856-1930), was the first to come to grips with the social issues leading to the 773


Mexican Revolution of 1910, and as such anticipates the novel of that revolution. The Cuban Carlos Loveira (1882-1928) produced a late example of the naturalist novel, Juan Criollo (1927), whose protagonist, reared in a family of higher social class, is nevertheless condemned to a life of misery by his lower-class birth. In Brazil, the most prominent writers in the realist-naturalist camp were Aluísio Azevedo (1857-1913), whose best works are Casa de Pensão (1884) and O cortiço (1890; A Brazilian Tenement, 1926; also as The Slum, 1999), and Adolfo Caminha (1867-1897), whose Bom crioulo (1895; Bom-Crioula: The Black Man and the Cabin Boy, 1982), concerning homosexuality in the Brazilian navy, produced a national scandal. Among the Brazilian writers whose novels defy classification are Euclides da Cunha (18661909), whose Os sertões (1902; Rebellion in the Backlands, 1944), regarded as one of the masterpieces of Brazilian literature, deals with war in the backlands and is similar to Sarmiento’s Facundo in its mixture of genres, and Raúl Pompéia (1863-1895), whose O Ateneu (1888) employs a boys’ boarding school as a microcosm of society. Equally difficult to classify is the man generally considered to be Brazil’s greatest writer, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), whose principal model was Laurence Sterne. Machado de Assis ignored naturalism to explore the psychological dimensions of alienation. Although he is considered a pioneer of psychological realism, his major concern is not with character development but with novelistic technique, so that his work both fits into the emerging aestheticist tendencies of the Spanish-speaking countries and anticipates the later Latin American novel’s preoccupation with language as such, in the handling of which he is an acknowledged master. His first work of excellence is Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881; The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, 1951; better known as Epitaph of a Small Winner, 1952), but it was only with Quincas Borba (1891; Philosopher or Dog?, 1954; also as The Heritage of Quincas Borba, 1954) and Dom Casmurro (1899; English translation, 1953) that his greatness was generally recognized. A significant novel later retrieved from critical oblivion was important in the development of technical excellence in the 774


late nineteenth century: Mitío el empleado (1887), by the Cuban Ramón Meza (1861-1911), is characterized by what has been described as a picaresque costumbrismo similar to that of Emilio Rabasa. It exhibits a Wheel of Fortune structure somewhat similar to that of The Itching Parrot, as the hero experiences a rise, a fall, and finally what is presumably a permanent rise in Mexico. The work’s picaresque qualities, rooted in the Cuban choteo—the Trickster-like practice of mocking everything— anticipates a persistent humorism in the modern Spanish American novel. Known as one of the foremost Modernista poets, the Colombian José Asunción Silva (1865-1896) produced De sobremesa (1896), a lesser-known novel of some importance for the understanding of the direction the genre was taking around the end of the nineteenth century. Rooted in the aesthetic decadentism that was one of the primary characteristics of urban Latin American culture at that time, it presents a protagonist whose values are emphatically those of the Modernistas, just as the earlier Colombian writer Jorge Isaacs’s Efraín (in Isaacs’s novel María) is the quintessential Spanish American Romantic hero. The Modernista concern for aesthetic values as opposed to those of pragmatism is delineated in an essay by the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó (1871-1917), Ariel (1900; English translation, 1922), a work perfectly placed for psychological impact at the opening of the new century. In it, Rodó insists that the developing culture of Latin America, while taking advantage of the admirable advances of technology in North America, reject its materialistic values in favor of those of the spirit. Ariel profoundly influenced an entire generation of Latin American intellectuals. The Early Twentieth Century In the novel at this time, there is an increasing commitment to technical quality, along with an attempt at a more skillful analysis of the regions in which the authors lived. Regionalist tendencies were accentuated in the first decades of the twentieth century by the relative isolation of national capitals from one another, and added to the geographical isolation was the almost worshipful attention paid by authors in each region to what was 775


taking place in Europe, so that a writer in Lima and one in Santiago might each be far more aware of the literary scene in Paris than in the other’s city. Therefore, the regionalist tendency became strong within a general criollista current. One of the most skillful of the regionalist writers was Tomás Carrasquilla (1858-1940), whose novels, including Frutos de mi tierra (1896), Grandeza (1910), La marquesa de Yolombó (1928), and Hace tiempos (1935), are set in the city and countryside of Colombia’s Antioquia, a region of difficult access before the advent of air travel. Correspondingly, the circumstances of Carrasquilla’s characters are static, as is generally the case in the early regionalist novels of Latin America. Characterization for Carrasquilla is largely by way of regionalistic speech. In Chile, Blest Gana had a successor in Luis Orrego Luco (1866-1949), whose Casa grande (1908) was the first novel to analyze in depth the life of the Chilean upper classes. Orrego Luco’s concern, that of the psychological penetration of a social sphere that interests him, using a calm, controlled, polished language, is typical of Chilean fiction, from its inception to the present day, and is especially evident in the work of José Donoso. Orrego Luco is something of a transitional figure, standing between nineteenth century realism and twentieth century criollismo. Another transitional figure is Manuel Gálvez (18821962), who straddled the gap between Romanticism and Modernismo, producing books of unbridled subjectivism, a quality associated with both schools. As typically Argentine as Orrego Luco was Chilean, Gálvez sought to analyze his nation’s reality in terms of his own ongoing spiritual crisis, to produce an opus illustrative of his and Argentina’s anxiety and hope for the future. His La maestra normal (1914) is a prime example of the costumbrista novel, but in its agonized introspection it anticipates the novels of Eduardo Mallea as well as the call for social reform and women’s rights. Among the Brazilian regionalists, the most prominent was Lima Barreto (1881-1922), who, like Machado de Assis, was black. Unlike Machado de Assis, however, Barreto reacted violently against the racism that he felt even in his relatively easygoing country, becoming a militant anarchist. His bitter parodies 776


of the Brazilian mainstream caused the critics of his day to ignore him. Out of the wave-interference pattern of sometimes contradictory literary movements, there emerged some novels of clearly definable Modernista character, while others whose Modernista aesthetic is discernible, such as El embrujo de Sevilla (1922; Castanets, 1929) and El gaucho florido (1932), by the Uruguayan Carlos Reyles (1868-1938), betray the melodramatic character of the old Romanticism. Among the better Modernista novelists was the Chilean Augusto d’Halmar (1882-1950). In 1902, Manuel Díaz Rodríguez (1871-1927) published Sangre patricia (English translation, 1946), in which he struggled to force psychological penetration beyond the limits of Modernismo’s usual superficiality. In it, however, even the protagonist’s suicide becomes a positive aesthetic event. Another tour de force is La gloria de don Ramiro (1908; The Glory of Don Ramiro, 1924), by Enrique Larreta (1875-1961), which employs a historical setting in Toledo as the basis for a transformation of that reality into a sensorial experience—a process betraying Modernismo’s roots in Symbolism, in which the object perceived is gradually metamorphosed into a representation of the observer’s psychic state. Some critics have mistakenly placed Rafael Arévalo Martínez (1884-1975) and his works, such as El hombre que parecía un caballo (1916), in the naturalist camp because his characters are often compared to animals. In fact, this process in his stories is also an example of Symbolist transformation. The advent of modern communications eventually began unifying Latin America to the extent that authors came to have freer access to one another. There are some modern authors who have commented that, as their centuries-long insularity finally gave way, they became aware of their common goals, and several have even spoken of “the novel that we are all writing,” which has issued in Carlos Fuentes’s attempt, in Terra nostra (1975; English translation, 1976), to pick up the quests of the heroes of several novels written by his peers and complete them, even bringing a number of those heroes together at the conclusion of his novel. This attitude stands in contrast to that of many nationalistic leaders of the individual countries, who at times in777


sist that there is no real Latin America—that each individual nation is an entity in itself and impossible to classify with others. As the authors of Latin America came to an increasing awareness of their common experience and concerns, regionalist tendencies gradually became less important, and the focus came to be upon America as a problem. While European literary currents continued to exercise a strong influence, a complex series of events moved the Latin American novel into the channels it was to follow. Rodó’s plea for a continuing stress on Latin American cultural identity was very much in the minds of these writers, as they wrote in the costumbrista and criollista modes. This Latin American identity was reinforced in 1910 by the centennial of the outbreak of the wars for independence from Spain. Intellectuals became preoccupied with what Latin America had become in those hundred years, and their stress on America as a viable, powerful entity in itself, rather than a stepchild of Europe, became known as mundonovismo. Because little had changed with independence save the replacement of Spanish-born political leaders by governors of Spanish descent born in the New World, in many cases government had deteriorated into dictatorship. One of the worst of these governments in terms of its emphasis on progress at the expense of the cynical exploitation of the poor was that of Porfirio Díaz in Mexico, and in another instance of timing with considerable symbolic value, in the centennial year of 1910, a true revolution (as opposed to the typical Latin American replacement of one dictator by another) broke out there. Latin Americans, already profoundly concerned with the direction to be taken by their region, watched closely as, in the midst of the Mexican Revolution, World War I broke out, and then, before either war was concluded, the Russian Revolution took place. Sociopolitical upheaval was clearly the order of the day, and Latin America already had a well-established tradition of writers influencing the course of such events. This confluence of currents produced, among other effects, a subgenre of the regionalist novel, that of the Mexican Revolution, the first example of which appeared in the course of the fighting. Los de abajo (1916; The Underdogs, 1929) is most notable 778


for the ability of its author, Mariano Azuela (1873-1952), to transform living experience into fiction as it occurred. The work has the typically Mexican circular structure, the protagonist dying at the same location at which he begins his successful career in the revolution. While this has been termed an epic structure, it may also be viewed as another turn of the Wheel of Fortune, indicative not only of the nature of one revolutionary’s fortunes but also of the lot of the nation as a whole as its revolution was to lead to new forms of death-dealing oppression. The Underdogs was largely ignored until 1925, when journalists discovered it and brought it to the public’s attention. Martín Luis Guzmán (1887-1976) also published a work linked to journalism, El águila y la serpiente (1928; The Eagle and the Serpent, 1930), which is a novel of the sort that a war correspondent might be expected to write; it nevertheless contains some of the best prose of its day. The next year, he produced La sombra del caudillo (1929), in which he, like Azuela, views the Mexican people as being swept inexorably along by the revolution. For him, its story is one of caudillos, the petty regional dictators whose story was to emerge in its most powerful form in a work by Juan Rulfo (1918-1986), Pedro Páramo (1955; English translation, 1959). Gregorio López y Fuentes (1897-1966), in his El indio (1935; English translation, 1961), bridges the gap between the novel of the Mexican Revolution and the Indianist (indigenismo) novel, examining the role played by Indians in the conflict and questioning their treatment since that time. In doing so, he moves away from the traditional narrative technique of Mexico’s novel involving the common people, treating them as masses rather than as individuals. Many other authors turned to a portrayal of the Indian plight during the 1920’s and 1930’s. If America was a problem, then at its roots was the situation of its aboriginal peoples, who had been raped, slaughtered, enslaved, and generally exploited throughout the centuries since the conquest. John S. Brushwood pointed out that three stages should be recognized in the development of Indian-oriented fiction in Latin America. The first has its roots in some of the earliest writings of the region, in works such as Arauco domado (1596; Arauco 779


Tamed, 1948), by Pedro de Oña (1570-c. 1643). In this epic poem, the aboriginal American is glorified and made to conform to European ideals of language, behavior, and even physical appearance. Later, under the influence of French writers such as Chateaubriand, these conceptions were reinforced in the “noble savage” mode, as in Avellaneda’s Guatimozín or Mera’s Cumandá. The second stage involves a view of Indians as a problem, describing and protesting against social injustice and dealing with them in terms of what has been called social realism, as in El indio. Finally, there are novels such as Los ríos profundos (1958; Deep Rivers, 1978), by José María Arguedas (1911-1969), and Oficio de tinieblas (1966; The Book of Lamentations, 1996), by Rosario Castellanos (1915-1974), in which the author actually writes from the Indians’ viewpoint, revealing their vital experience from within. These works belong to a period of more universal concerns in the novel in general. In the regionalist mode of the second stage, one of the important novels is that of the poet César Vallejo (1892-1938), El tungsteno (1931; Tungsten, 1988), dealing with the agelong problems of Indians in the mines of Latin America. In other Indianist novels, the stress is on the unjust distribution of land, not merely for the purpose of pointing out the problem of economic exploitation but because of the Indians’ need for a sense of belonging. In this connection, it should be stressed that to the extent that Marxist concepts entered Latin American thinking in this area, they tended to be received in terms not so much of their economic import as of their cultural import, which is in part the result of the fact that these writers derived their Marxist ideals from Nikolay Berdyaev rather than the more economically oriented theoreticians. Thus, while the Indians in these second-stage novels are generally portrayed as masses, they are never simple adjuncts to an economic theory, but rather a people in quest of ethnic wholeness. An early example by Alcides Arguedas (1879-1946), Raza de bronce (1919), deals with the impossible position in which Indians find themselves, even while the author fails to call for any radical change. Jorge Icaza (1906-1978), in his Huasipungo (1934; The Villagers, 1964), chose to employ scenes of unspeak780


able atrocity to shock the reader into indignation, while the Mexican Mauricio Magdaleno (1906-1986) makes use of astronomical metaphors to depict the Indians’ situation in El resplandor (1937; Sunburst, 1944), reflecting the preconquest belief of the people in a destiny set in the heavens. The last significant novel in this stage, by the Peruvian Ciro Alegría (1909-1967), was El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941; Broad and Alien Is the World, 1941), in which the Indians are dispossessed by the greed of white people. The novel is most notable for its creation of a powerful individual, the chief Rosendo Maqui, a sign of hope as in his human qualities he towers over his oppressors in their venality. One of the issues that greatly intrigued the regionalists was the response of Americans to a nature that was often perceived as overwhelming. During the 1920’s, this concern resulted in a series of landmark novels, each dealing with the issue in a different manner. The novelist of the Colombian jungle, José Eustacio Rivera (1889-1928), wrote of how “men disintegrate like worms and nature closes implacably over them.” His La vorágine (1924; The Vortex, 1935) treats the jungle as an irresistible destructive force, reducing human beings to pitiful shells and then swallowing them. Sarmiento’s civilization-versus-barbarism theme was transferred to the plains of Venezuela by Rómulo Gallegos (1884-1969), who later was to become president of his country. His Doña Bárbara (1929; English translation, 1931), complete with allegorical names, portrays the victory of citybased enlightenment over superstition and the raw lust for power found in the outlying regions. In Sarmiento’s Argentina, however, what appeared in Facundo as an ambivalent Romantic attitude toward the gaucho is transformed into a Modernista presentation of him as, paradoxically, the Romantic ideal of humans in harmony with nature in both suffering and triumph: Don Segundo Sombra (1926; English translation, 1935), by Ricardo Güiraldes (1886-1927), is a sort of Bildungsroman for Argentine youth, in which the hero is drawn from his effeminate civilized surroundings into the gaucho world, eventually to return as a landowner. The cycle of major novels dealing with humans and nature is completed, as humans have been viewed as dominated by nature, dominant over 781


it, and in harmony with it. Each of the novels deals with the problems of a specific region, even while creating an experience to which all Latin Americans can relate. The fact that the three can be seen almost as a loose sort of unwitting trilogy on humans and nature is indicative of the growing tendency of Latin American writers to write on the same topics in ways that indicate shared experiences and concerns. The 1920’s and 1930’s There has been an unfortunate critical tendency to treat the situation of prose fiction in the 1920’s and 1930’s as if the only significant works were of the regionalist variety, whether they dealt with the Mexican Revolution, social issues of some other sort, or more general Latin American themes. For this reason, many have viewed later Latin American novels as if they had been created ex nihilo or pieced together from foreign sources. The fact is that there had been a more or less steady and consistent development of the vanguardist novel, parallel to those works preoccupied with sociopolitical issues. The most important link between the two lay in the profound rejection of existing social values in virtually all the novels of this period. From that point on, there was a divergence, some writers, as in the nineteenth century, being more concerned with their message than with the language in which it was couched, while others were primarily concerned with their novels as works of art. In the mid1910’s, the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) produced his “Creationist Manifesto,” in which he rejected the demand that the artist reproduce external reality to make mimetic art, asserting instead the right to invent new realities, in an art involving genetic processes. Huidobro’s view is that the poet is “a little god,” so that each literary work is a new creation in the world. In the full flush of social commitment, his cries were ignored by a considerable percentage of writers, but many more followed his lead and those of other influential writers, among whom Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and the Peninsular author Benjamín Jarnés are the most frequently mentioned. In the 1920’s, these theories were displayed most prominently in a series of often short-lived literary magazines. 782


At this time, vanguardist writers experimented with such techniques as antichronological development and interior monologue. In the fiction of this period, characterization is radically interiorized, and there are often variations in the narrative point of view. There is an increasing concern with visual effects and the use of startling imagery, along with an interest in playing with typography. Underlying it all, there is the conviction that the author is under no obligation to reproduce visible reality. El café de nadie (1926), by Arqueles Vela (born 1899), is heavy with radical innovations, including the concept of a fictional space within which the plot develops, and some early experiments with Surrealism. Even when a novel of this time bears a regional cast, the increasing interest in a psychological penetration of the characters often places the universal orientation of an author in bold relief. The best examples in this period are two works of the Chilean Eduardo Barrios (1884-1963): El niño que enloqueció de amor (1915; The Little Boy Driven Mad by Love, 1967), in which a young boy falls in love with his mother’s friend, and El hermano asno (1922; Brother Ass, 1922), a study of the emotional torment of a saintly monk. In the same decade, La educación sentimental (1929), by Jaime Torres Bodet (1902-1974), focuses on interior experience to such a degree that there is virtually no action. In the Argentine tradition of novels dealing with anguished characters obsessed with questions concerning the meaning of an alienated existence is Los siete locos (1929; The Seven Madmen, 1984), by Roberto Arlt (1900-1942), in which the revolutionary impulse has motives solely of personal gain. The Nietzschean will to power figures largely, as does Joycean interior monologue. In Chile, what Fernando Alegría terms the “deathblow to criollismo” was produced in two stages. In 1934, María Luisa Bombal (1910-1980) published La última niebla (The Final Mist, 1982; previously published as The House of Mist, 1947), which deals in a cool and elegant style with both the universal human condition and specifically feminine psychology. It was not until 1951, however, that Manuel Rojas (1896-1973) completed the process with Hijo de ladrón (Born Guilty, 1955), a completely secular novel—something virtually unknown before this time in 783


Latin America—that examines the life of a modern people in the cosmopolitan vein. Modernism In Brazil, the regionalist tendency was first challenged by that country’s version of modernism, which represents a combination of vanguardist currents. Modernism suddenly appeared on the scene in 1922 and had the effect of making poetry dominant until 1930, when a series of neorealistic novels of a social orientation began appearing, among them Vidas sêcas (1938; Barren Lives, 1965), by Graciliano Ramos (1892-1953), a novel of psychological realism in the tradition of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis focusing on character development rather than plot. Still another major contribution to the complex set of influences on the Latin American novel was made by Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), who never wrote a novel himself but whose short stories serve as the primary impetus of what Seymour Menton calls cosmopolitismo. In the work of Borges, who wrote in Buenos Aires, prose fiction tends to move away from rural, regional concerns and into more urbane, universal settings, with the result that in the last several decades of the twentieth century there was a curious split in the best Latin American novels, some, such as Rayuela (1963; Hopscotch, 1966), by Julio Cortázar (1914-1984), with settings in the great cities of Europe and America, and others, most notably Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970), by Gabriel García Márquez (born 1928), set in remote rural areas but nevertheless universal for it. Borges’s major scholarly interests lie in medieval Northern Europe and England, and Nordic mythology therefore plays a role in his stories. He is known for his play with mythic and philosophical concepts, and his stories are rife with paranormal events, which differ from those of writers interested in the African and indigenous traditions mainly in having their roots in European mythologies and philosophies. In Borges, the author’s demand for the right to invent his or her own reality comes to full fruition. His Ficciones, 1935-1944 (1944; English translation, 1962) and El Aleph (1949, 1952; translated in The Aleph, and Other Stories, 1933-1969, 1970) ap784


peared at exactly the right moment, as the Latin American novel was ready to move into a new phase and take its place as one of the most creative and active in the world. Even before Borges’s landmark works, however, Juan Filloy (1894-2000) had produced a radical piece of fiction entitled Op Oloop (1934, 1967) in the Joycean tradition, particularly in its innovative language. In 1941, Macedonio Fernández (1874-1952) published Una novela que comienza, insisting in the text that if he can locate a certain woman he has seen and incorporate her into the work, the novel can get under way. In this period, throughout Latin America, the general inclination to express dissatisfaction with social values was giving way to a cultural internationalism on the one hand and political liberalism on the other. Adán Buenosayres (1948), by Leopoldo Marechal (1900-1970), presents a character attempting to re-create Buenos Aires through language in order to make it conform to such ideals. The Surrealists took a deep interest in inner landscapes. As painters, they portrayed visions supposedly arisen from the unconscious mind, while the poets, following André Breton’s model of “the chance occurrence, upon a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella,” wanted to be the first to join two words together. Such a preoccupation with the unconscious and the seemingly irrational involves a flight from normal, supposedly logical, visions of reality that merge with several other concerns of the Latin American novelists of this era, among them an interest in penetrating beneath the surface of the Indians’ world into their often radically different vision of the cosmos. The word “primitive” began to lose its negative connotations as archaeologists and anthropologists revealed that the pre-Columbian civilizations had been vastly superior in many aspects to that of the Europeans who conquered them. Latin American writers came to the realization that the myths, folktales, and rituals of even the modern descendants of the Mayas and Incas could not be dismissed as inferior, childish attempts to be civilized in the European sense. Contributing to this change in attitude was the decreasing influence of the Church, which had condemned such myths and rituals as pagan and therefore satanic. Furthermore, Europe 785


was experiencing yet another resurgence of interest in its own ancient mythologies, which were proving to be fascinatingly similar to those that anthropologists were collecting around the world. One result, in a world in which it appeared that the values of Western civilization were leading only to war and chaos, was a sense that the concepts that had aided in structuring the ancient societies of a region should be examined in search of their possible values for the same region in the twentieth century. Writers such as Joyce appeared to be searching for significance in their characters’ acts by relating them to the archetypal deeds of the heroes of the past. Joyce, whose influence has been considerable in the Latin American novel, early went to Odysseus as a model and later seemed to allude to the Irish hero Finn MacCool and the expectation of his return to life in Finnegans Wake (1939). Much of Latin America had placed its hope in European values. Sarmiento, having reluctantly rejected the gauchos (who were mainly mestizos) as a viable social force, called for European immigration as the salvation of Argentina. Civilization must prevail over the barbarity of the plains, and Gallegos echoed the cry from Venezuela eight decades later. Yet by 1929, with Arlt’s The Seven Madmen, it was becoming evident that Sarmiento’s theories were not working in the most important area, that of the human spirit. Other voices had been heard, although they had been overwhelmed for a considerable length of time. Eugenio María de Hostos (1839-1903), active in education in the Caribbean, declared in an essay entitled “El cholo” that the hope of America lay in the fusion of the three major racial groups: Caucasian, African, and Indian. Later, in La raza cósmica (1925; The Cosmic Race, 1979), José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), a Mexican writer, expressed the theory that Latin America had the unique opportunity to reunite those racial groups, drawing on the strengths of each to build a great new society. In order to do so, the intelligentsia would have to examine and come to a comprehension of the roots of the thinking of those groups, as expressed in Latin America. One early attempt was made by the brilliant Cuban Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980), 786


in ¡Ecué-Yamba-O! Historia Afro-Cubana (1933), an examination of the Afro-Cuban religious cults. Later, the author was to repudiate the work, having realized that he had been far from any true understanding of the premodern thought of the people involved. The Nobel Prize winner from Guatemala, Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974), was the first to make a serious attempt to deal adequately with Indian mythology, with his Leyendas de Guatemala (1930), in which he recovers as much as possible of the thought of the Mayas as it survived in their descendants. Asturias serves as something of a transitional figure, for his social commitment is abundantly clear in his attacks on Latin American dictatorship and the United Fruit Company in works such as El Señor Presidente (1946; The President, 1963) and Hombres de maíz (1949; Men of Maize, 1975), while at the same time he laid the foundation for what was to become known as Magical Realism in Latin American prose fiction (not to be confused with the movement of the same name in North American painting). In Men of Maize, he revealed the continued effect of the Popol Vuh on the life of the Central American Indian. Magical Realism The term “Magical Realism” is nebulous, and many authors and critics prefer lo real maravilloso, which is based loosely on the French Surrealists’ concept of le merveilleux. Magical Realism is fundamentally a reflection of the twentieth century’s departure from what has been perceived as bourgeois categories. Psychology and sociology have shown that rational categories are not necessarily dominant in determining the course of the life of a person or society, and even physics has departed from the Newtonian model, with its more or less mechanistic bias. While the nineteenth century realist wanted to show life as it was actually lived, the Magical Realist believes that true reality is that which underlies the ordinary events of daily life. In this sense, the term “realism” is accurate, for writers in this vein believe that, once found, reality will always prove to have a paranormal, magical cast to it. Typically, in this type of fiction, supernatural occurrences are narrated in a matter-of-fact manner, as if they formed a part of normal daily life. 787


Demetrio Aguilera Malta (1909-1981) had been experimenting with such alternative realities in the early 1930’s, along with writers such as Carpentier and Asturias. His Don Goyo (1933; English translation, 1942, 1980) reveals an early animistic tendency to personify nature that was to contrast sharply with the views of Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose Pour un nouveau roman (1963; For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, 1965) contains a fierce repudiation of the pathetic fallacy of the Romantics. Aguilera Malta commented that if the works that he and others were writing in this vein during the 1930’s had been received more enthusiastically, they would have continued writing them, but the Socialist Realist tendency nearly swamped the other. Only in 1970 did he return with one of the best examples of the novel of Magical Realism, Siete lunas y siete serpientes (Seven Serpents and Seven Moons, 1979), with its eerie, brooding evocation of the Ecuadoran jungle. People are transformed into animals or appear to be manifestations of otherworldly beings, and even the narrator is unsure of whether to believe what he has recounted. By the time he provides the reader with a rational explanation, the reader is not persuaded that it is valid. In the context of the same great pre-Columbian culture, the Peruvian José María Arguedas, while, like most of these authors, not an Indian himself, lamented the inadequacy of the Spanish language to express the realities experienced by the descendants of the Incas, for his native language was the Quechua of the Indian household servants among whom he spent his first few years. His powerful Yawar fiesta (English translation, 1985) was published in 1941. In the same period, however, there was another current in Latin American fiction, based in the Río de la Plata (often referred to as River Plate) region, which has experienced little influence from indigenous groups. The Argentine Eduardo Mallea (1903-1982) was extremely influential in the years between 1934 and 1940, and in 1941, his Todo verdor perecerá (All Green Shall Perish, 1966) was published. It is a vaguely existentialist work of human alienation, angst, and the impossibility of meaningful communication between people, yet it lacks the existentialist’s concept of self-affirmation through struggle. The works of the 788


Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994) are in much the same vein. His Tierra de nadie (No Man’s Land, 1994) also appeared in 1941, and his later works, such as El astillero (1961; The Shipyard, 1968), present the same dismal atmosphere of hopelessness. The Argentine Ernesto Sábato (born 1911) deals with psychological and sociological issues. In El túnel (1948; The Outsider, 1950; also known as The Tunnel) he, too, presents the case of people together physically but spiritually isolated from one another. Later, in Sobre héroes y tumbas (1961; On Heroes and Tombs, 1981), he makes use of the Borgesian labyrinth as his hero descends to the network of sewers underlying Buenos Aires. His Abaddón, el exterminador (1974; The Angel of Darkness, 1991) focuses on the Argentine apocalyptic motif, seen earlier in Arlt’s short story “La luna roja” and in Mallea’s work. There appeared a number of novels that might be considered transitional between the older regionalist and vanguard tendencies and the explosive nouveau roman, or New Novel. In them, there is what Fernando Alegría calls a thirst for universality, along with a further development of the long-standing movement to move from mimetic to genetic forms. If the Impressionist artist had demanded the right to portray his or her subjective reactions to the perceived, and Huidobro had insisted that the poet is a creator rather than an imitator, Borges would absorb such theory and delight in creating a mixture of philosophy, fantasy, and play elements. The novelists accepted his spirit of inventiveness, using language to draw the reader into a new sort of participatory experience. Among the important transitional novels is Al filo del agua (1947; The Edge of the Storm, 1963), by Agustín Yáñez (1904-1980), a work regional in its setting but more concerned with the interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts of the characters and with the use of whatever narrative techniques the author believes are most effective in presenting them. Another experimenter is the aforementioned Asturias, whose The President uses vanguard techniques to re-create the atmosphere of dread that characterizes the Latin American dictatorship. In 1949, Carpentier published El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1957), introducing in it his preoccupation with the cyclical nature of tyranny and revolution, employ789


ing a highly cerebral style. In Los pasos perdidos (1953; The Lost Steps, 1956), Carpentier experimented with time, at the same time laying hold of the ongoing American fascination with the marvelous qualities of the land. In it, the protagonist is able to travel backward in time by departing from a modern city into the ever more primitive wilderness. Ten years later, Carpentier’s masterful El siglo de las luces (1962; Explosion in a Cathedral, 1963) was to ring the historical novel firmly into the stream of the new fiction. The Mexican novel, with its rich tradition leading from The Itching Parrot through the works of its revolution and those of Yáñez, began to come to full maturity in Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo. Like much of Mexican fiction, it is preoccupied with death, and the reader eventually learns that all the characters, including the narrator, are dead. In a sense, this, too, is a transitional work, in that its setting is regional and it deals with the caudillo system and the revolution, but in it the act of making art is the controlling factor, and the predominant impression gained by the reader is one of the magical atmosphere into which the protagonist descends as he visits the town of his birth, an atmosphere made up of classical mythology, pre-Columbian ideologies, and even voodoo. In his first novel, La región más transparente (1958; Where the Air Is Clear, 1960), Carlos Fuentes (born 1928) deals with the betrayal of the Mexican Revolution in a generally realistic manner, while frankly admitting the influence of Joyce, John Dos Passos, and several other foreign writers where technique is concerned. He attempts to incorporate an element of lo real maravilloso in the form of a character known as Ixca Cienfuegos, a sort of incarnation of Mexico’s indigenous heritage, who, as a quasimythic being, is not very well integrated with the other characters. In his later novels, Fuentes moved more fully into the mythic mode, with the exception of Las buenas conciencias (1959; The Good Conscience, 1961) and La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1964); in them and his short stories, he was refining the themes and techniques he was to use in his massive Terra nostra, which represents an attempt to mythologize the history of the West for the past two thousand years. In its ex790


tremely free handling of time, multiple reincarnations, appearances of supernatural beings such as Satan, and other features, it represents a manifestation of Magical Realism carried to the limit. While Terra nostra is his most important novel, his best technical achievement remains The Death of Artemio Cruz, a masterpiece of novelistic construction in which another character guilty of betraying the Mexican Revolution is viewed at the time of his death. Narration is variously in the first, second, and third persons, and in the present, future, and past tenses, respectively. The New Latin American Novel Fuentes’s works are central to the related but separate phenomena known as the “New Latin American Novel” and the “Boom.” The former refers to what most critics would call the coming of age of the Latin American novel, a gradual process that was accelerated in the 1950’s. At that time, the prose fiction of the area was worthy of moving into the realm of world literature and exercising a good deal of influence of its own. On the other hand, the Boom, somewhat difficult to define at best, is fundamentally a phenomenon of the 1960’s and early 1970’s involving a more general recognition of the quality of the novels of a limited group of authors, some of whom believe that the Boom was essentially a phenomenon of public relations and economics, in that a few authors became celebrities and were at last able to make a living from their writing and closely related activities: Fuentes, García Márquez, Cortázar, Rulfo, Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Donoso, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others. Donoso (1924-1996) wrote its story in his Historia personal del “boom” (1972; The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History, 1977), while Fuentes produced an excellent analysis of the larger movement, entitled La nueva novela hispanoamericana, in 1969. The Chilean Donoso’s novelistic production represents an advance in the novelist’s art in his country at the same time that it continues that country’s tradition of examining a segment of society by the use of carefully controlled language. His Este domingo (1965; This Sunday, 1967) dissects the wealthy class of San791


tiago, while the shorter El lugar sin límites (1966; Hell Has No Limits, 1972) deals with the underclass. His best novel, El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970; The Obscene Bird of Night, 1973), employs more radical techniques. The work of Julio Cortázar presents a major example of the movement of the Latin American novel into the universal sphere. The novel that first attracted the world’s attention to him was Hopscotch. Moving from the sterile atmosphere of most of the Argentine novels of his generation, he presents a far more authentic existentialist hero in Horacio Oliveira (although author and character would deny the latter’s adherence to the existentialist philosophy), who converses with others in Buenos Aires and Paris and almost reaches them. The essential point is that Oliveira is a person in motion, creating a persona, however defective, as he moves. There is humor in the work, the title of which presents the reader with a child’s-play version of Borges’s characteristic labyrinth. The chapters are not presented in any prescribed order; Cortázar only suggests a hopscotch order in which the reader might approach them. One of his important contributions to the New Novel is his insistence that the reader participate in the creative act with him. Five years after Hopscotch, speculating on the possibility of constructing a novel on the basis of “found” materials, including chapter 62 of the earlier novel, he produced 62: Modelo para armar (1968; 62: A Model Kit, 1972). Among Cortázar’s other novels is Libro de Manuel (1973; A Manual for Manuel, 1978), a handbook for a child growing up in a world of radical change. The Cuban exile Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929-2005) produced two novels based on humor—especially puns and other forms of wordplay—and, as in Hopscotch, the frenetic search for creativity in chaotic language. Tres tristes tigres (1967, 1990; Three Trapped Tigers, 1971) challenges its reader to discover a meaningful structure, which emerges only on the level of a nebulous mythology created by language as it disintegrates. After a series of books of essays and short stories, in 1979 Cabrera Infante brought forth La Habana para un infante difunto (Infante’s Inferno, 1984), a Bildungsroman dealing with the sexual initiation of a young would-be Don Juan in pre-Castro Havana. 792


Another explosive experiment with language and mythology in Cuba was Paradiso (1966; English translation, 1974), by the premier poet of that country, José Lezama Lima (1910-1976), a novel that in a sense constitutes his poetics. A dense atmosphere is created as the author overlays his characters’ words and deeds with metaphor, in one expression of what the critics have termed the Cuban neobaroque. Lezama Lima, too, appears to be attempting to lend significance to his characters’ acts by comparing them to the archetypal deeds of heroes. Another major writer of the Cuban baroque tendency is Severo Sarduy (1937-1993), who wrote a number of novels characterized by an explosive language and humor, among them De donde son los cantantes (1967; From Cuba with a Song, 1972) and Cobra (1972; English translation, 1975). Reinaldo Arenas (19431990), forced to leave Cuba in 1980 as one of the boat people, combined features of Magical Realism with a baroque style in El mundo alucinante (1969; Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Life and Adventures of Friar Servando Teresa de Mier, 1971) but generally withdrew from both in his more important El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas (1975; The Palace of the White Skunks, 1990). Carpentier, who had done much to provoke the baroque movement in Cuba by his use of a self-consciously erudite style, in 1974 published El recurso del método (Reasons of State, 1976), which is one of a number of Latin American novels appearing in various countries in the space of a few years to deal with the subject of dictatorship. One of the persistent themes of the Latin American novel for more than a century had been the “shadow” of the dictator, the man depersonalized and viewed more as a malevolent force, as in Amalia or, a century later, in The President, but in some of the new novels of dictatorship there is a tendency analogous to the new presentation of Indians from their own perspective, as the reader now finds himself or herself inside the dictator’s palace and, in some cases, inside his mind. Carpentier creates a powerful effect by the use of interior monologue to characterize his Primer Magistrado. In Hijo de hombre (1960; Son of Man, 1965), by the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos (born 1917), the emphasis is still on the action of the people against tyranny as exemplified by the individual dictator, while Aguilera 793


Malta had moved into a radically mythic vision with Seven Serpents and Seven Moons in 1970 only to descend to an often ludicrous level through an excess of Magical Realism in El secuestro del general (Babelandia, 1985) in 1973. The novel of this tendency that has received the most attention is El otoño del patriarca (1975; The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975), by Gabriel García Márquez, a personal view of the perennial dictator in decline. Exaggerating the already incredible events typical of such a dictator’s rule, he attempts to re-create the stifling atmosphere of tyranny, an atmosphere that unfortunately is communicated to the text itself. García Márquez had previously dealt with the towns of the Caribbean coast of Colombia, in that often seemingly regional focus of the New Novel that nevertheless takes on universal appeal in the nature of the experience created in the text. His La hojarasca (1955; Leaf Storm, and Other Stories, 1972) and El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1961; No One Writes to the Colonel, 1968) had already established his reputation when he published One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967. This is the Latin American novel that has had the greatest impact worldwide, and it won for García Márquez the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. The novel is the history of a fictional town called Macondo and of the Buendía family within it. Reversing normal values so that the commonplace appears marvelous and vice versa, and exercising the storyteller’s right to exaggerate and embellish, García Márquez has created another prime example of Magical Realism, one in which the atmosphere is the private property of author and reader, bearing little relationship to reality outside the text. It subsequently became difficult to establish trends and tendencies in other Latin American fiction. There has been a wide variety of subjects and treatments, ranging from the Argentine Manuel Puig’s tongue-in-cheek satires on pop culture in such works as La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968; Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, 1971) and Pubis angelical (1979; English translation, 1986) to the dense, brooding works of José María Arguedas, most notably his Deep Rivers. One of the foremost novelists of the period is the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa (born 1936), much of whose work has to do with the military establishment, prostitution, or a combination of the two. With La ciudad y los perros 794


(1962; The Time of the Hero, 1966), his credentials were established, and La casa verde (1965; The Green House, 1968) and Conversación en la catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975) continued in the vein of almost bitter analyses of Peruvian society. With Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978), however, he was drawn in spite of himself into a humorous treatment of the military and prostitution themes, and this approach continued in La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982), a masterful example of the New Novelist’s concern with revealing in his or her work the process involved in its composition. His La guerra del fin del mundo (1981; The War of the End of the World, 1984) is a long, difficult, and powerful novel based on the same historical incident that inspired Euclides da Cunha’s Rebellion in the Backlands. In Brazil, around 1960, there came about a rejection of the emphasis on the social message of the novel in favor of a concentration on the craft of the writer. The most prominent novelists of this generation have been João Guimarães Rosa (19081967) and Clarice Lispector (1925-1977). The former’s interest in universalizing local experience leads to a concentration on the mythic and folkloric traditions of the Brazilian outback, expressed in a Joycean language rich in neologisms and regional speech. His work culminates in Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956; The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, 1963). Lispector’s mentor was Lúcio Cardoso (1912-1962), whose Crónica da casa assassinada (1959) is considered one of the best of modern Brazilian novels. Lispector herself departs from Guimarães Rosa in emphasizing thematic development over technique, in works such as A maçã no escuro (1961; The Apple in the Dark, 1967). One of Brazil’s most popular novelists is Jorge Amado (1912-2001), whose works contain some of the finest treatments of the feminine experience in Latin American literature. The Late Twentieth Century After the Boom generation, the 1980’s inaugurated a new era in which women, gays, and Afro-Hispanics were finally allowed into the literary canon. While a Boom novel typically portrayed 795


the earnest search of the protagonist for the meaning of life, the post-Boom novel was more likely to describe a journey of this kind with parodic humor; pastiche was its favored trope. It is true that the Boom writers continued to publish during the 1980’s—García Márquez wrote Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1981; Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1982); Fuentes, Gringo viejo (1985; The Old Gringo, 1985); and Vargas Llosa, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? (1987; Who Killed Palomino Molero?, 1987)—but this era was especially characterized by a group of new writers. Luna caliente (1983; Sultry Moon, 1998), by the Argentine Mempo Giardinelli (born 1947), tells the story of a young man, Ramiro Bermúdez, recently returned to Buenos Aires from Paris, who has a distinguished career before him but whose life swiftly disintegrates once he becomes fascinated with Araceli, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a doctor friend, whom he rapes and kills (or so he thinks). The novel parodies the genre of the novela negra (hard-boiled crime novel) to produce a gripping plot, combined with a Cortazarian sense of the uncanny that unexpectedly explodes that world from within. Ardiente paciencia (1985; Burning Patience, 1987), by the Chilean Antonio Skármeta (born 1940), centers on the love affair and eventual marriage of Mario Jiménez and Beatriz González. In order to win Beatriz’s heart, Mario seeks the help of the famous Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, for whom he works as the postman. In a playfully parodic way, literature is depicted in the novel as a cultural reservoir which plays a direct formative role in the everyday lives of ordinary people. Gazapo (1965; English translation, 1968), by the Mexican Gustavo Sainz (born 1940), tells the story of a group of adolescent boys living in Mexico City who share their tales of sexual and criminal exploits with each other. The novel suggests that the telling of the stories is more important than the events that they supposedly relate, all of which gives the novel a playful feel. It was the novels of the female authors of the post-Boom that caught the public’s attention. While there were earnest political novels written by women during this period—Conversación al sur (1981; Mothers and Shadows, 1986) by Marta Traba (1930-1983) was the prototype—it was the way in which La casa de los espíritus 796


(1982; The House of the Spirits, 1985) by Isabel Allende (born 1942) mixed politics with Magical Realism that captured the readers’ imagination in Latin America and Europe. The novel traces the political struggle in twentieth century Chile between the Left (symbolized by Pedro García; his son, Pedro Segundo; and his grandson, Pedro Tercero) and the Right (personified by Esteban Trueba). Whereas the Left is presented in terms of continuity through family lineage, the Right is shown finally to be issueless, since Esteban Trueba’s male progeny either become Marxists (Jaime) or dropouts (Nicolás) and his female progeny fall in love with revolutionaries. Allende’s novel is ultimately a positive—as well as playful— affirmation of the value of solidarity in the face of evil and political oppression. Como agua para chocolate: Novela de entregas mensuales con recetas, amores, y remedios caseros (1989; Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies, 1992), by the Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel (born 1950), redolent of the television soap (a great favorite in Mexico), is, in essence, a feminist counterversion of the Mexican Revolution, offering a kitchen’s-eye view of those turbulent years that is at odds with the masculinist rhetoric of the history books. This novel was one of the best to emerge in the post-Boom era, and its humor and metaphoric flair were successfully carried over into the 1992 movie version, which was a box-office hit in the United States as well as Mexico. The most significant Hispanic gay writer, the Argentine Manuel Puig (1932-1990), had published his major works in the 1970’s—his masterpiece El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1979) came out in 1976—and these set the scene for the acceptance of gay writing in the following decade. Otra vez el mar (1982; Farewell to the Sea, 1986) by the Cuban Reinaldo Arenas is written from the perspective of a young Cuban couple who are spending a holiday on the beach. There is a plot of sorts (a woman moves with her son into the cabin next door, and the latter, mysteriously, is found dead later on that day), but more striking is the novel’s Joycean rejection of the limitations of Euclidean space and time and its playful use of language. La nave de los locos (1984; The Ship of Fools, 1989) by the Uruguayan797


Spanish writer Cristina Peri Rossi (born 1941) is a postmodern, gay text that rewrites the alphabet of Christian culture. It describes the misadventures of a character, whose name is simply a letter of the alphabet, equis (that is, X), in a variety of urban settings; the novel includes episodes describing sordid sexual encounters, far-fetched dream sequences, and Equis’s philosophizing about life and the universe with his companions, Vercingetorix and Graciela. Like gay writing, Afro-Hispanic literature also created space for itself in the new literary canon of the 1980’s, and here the major work is Changó, el gran putas (1983) by the Colombian Manuel Zapata Olivella (born 1920), which has five parts, each of which traces successive historical eras in which the Africans struggled against oppression in the New World. Zapata Olivella’s novel expresses a wake-up call for all Americans of African descent to take up the fight for the right to own their own culture. — William L. Siemens, updated by Stephen M. Hart Learn More Boland, Roy C., and Sally Harvey, eds. Magical Realism and Beyond: The Contemporary Spanish and Latin American Novel. Madrid: Vox/AHS, 1991. Explores Latin American authors’ use of Magical Realism in modern long fiction. King, John, ed. Modern Latin American Fiction: A Survey. London: Faber and Faber, 1987. An excellent collection of first-rate, readable essays on all the major novelists of the Boom, including Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortázar. Martin, Gerald. Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge, 1989. An elegantly written overview of the development of the Latin American novel in the twentieth century. Highly recommended. Shaw, Donald L. The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction. Saratoga Springs: State University of New York Press, 1998. An authoritative, hard-hitting survey of the main figures of the post-Boom novel written by an acknowledged expert. 798


Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. The best study of the Latin American nineteenth century novel. Separate chapters treat Amalia, Sab, and Iracema, examining the interplay between the path toward nationhood and the journey of love in those novels. Swanson, Philip. The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture After the Boom. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Authoritative overview of the work of the postBoom novelists. Contains separate chapters on Manuel Puig and Isabel Allende, among others. Williams, Raymond L. The Modern Latin American Novel. New York: Twayne, 1998. Part of Twayne’s Critical History of the Novel series, this is an excellent introduction to long fiction in Latin America.

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I

n the 1960’s and 1970’s, poets and other writers of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban descent formed three discrete groups in literary response to various social, historical, and cultural impulses in the United States at that time. The Civil Rights movement inspired literary Chicanos and Puerto Ricans (especially the Nuyoricans, as Puerto Ricans in New York were known) to write about their experiences in their own voices, which frequently were excluded from mainstream publications. The Cuban American poets of this period wrote primarily in Spanish and in response to the historical circumstance of their exile from Cuba. Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans still comprise the largest groups of Latino poets in the United States, although the field has grown to include writers of other backgrounds.

Literary Magazines and Anthologies The literary magazines and small press publications of the burgeoning Chicano, Nuyorican, and Cuban American literary culture are an essential source of information on the initial development of Latino poetry. Among the magazines of varying regional or national renown, significance, and circulation were the Chicano periodicals De Colores (Albuquerque, New Mexico), El Grito and Grito del Sol (Berkeley, California), and Tejidos (Austin, Texas); the Puerto Rican diaspora magazine The Rican (Chicago); and the Cuban American review Areíto (New York). Some of these small journals were edited by leading poets, such as Maize (San Diego), by Alurista, and Mango (San Jose), by Lorna Dee Cervantes. These and numerous other journals, whether interdisciplinary or purely literary in focus (and many of them highly ephemeral), provided a necessary publishing outlet for the alternative voices erupting throughout the United States during the 1960’s and 1970’s. These publications have recorded a momentous turning point in American literature. No serious study of the origins and development of Latino literature of any genre can be undertaken without considering 800

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Revista Chicano-Riqueña (1973-1985) and its continuation in The Americas Review (1986-1999). A long-running literary magazine founded by the historian and scholar Nicolás Kanellos, the journal focused on creative writing, with interviews, literary essays, scholarly articles, book reviews, and visual art complementing each issue. Beginning with the premier issue, the work of most of the major Chicano, Nuyorican, and, as coverage quickly expanded, other Latino poets appeared in the pages of these magazines, in many cases marking the first appearance of a writer on the literary radar. Tino Villanueva, Alurista, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Victor Hernández Cruz, Gary Soto, Ricardo Sánchez, Tato Laviera, Sandra María Esteves, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Pat Mora—to indicate only a few—figure among the Chicano and Nuyorican poets featured. In addition, the magazines published the poetry of writers better known for different genres, such as Rolando Hinojosa, Carlos Morton, Miguel Piñero, and Tomás Rivera. Many of these poets and other writers helped shape and influence the journal by doubling as contributing editors or editorial board members. Special or monographic issues focused on particular topics within U.S. Hispanic literature. The celebrated Woman of Her Word: Hispanic Women Write, edited by Chicana poet Evangelina Vigil (volume 11, nos. 3/4, 1983) anthologizes the finest Latina writing of that time. Several issues emphasize the Latino writers active in various regions of the United States, including Chicago (volume 5, no. 1, 1977), Wisconsin (volume 13, no. 2, 1985), Houston (volume 16, no. 1, 1988), and the Pacific Northwest (volume 23, nos. 3/4, 1995). The tenth and twentieth anniversary anthologies (1982 and 1992) provide a selection of the major poetical works published in the Revista and the Review during those decades. The Americas Review ceased publication in 1999, but Kanellos’s singular mission to promote and publish Hispanic literature of the United States would continue through the ongoing publications of Arte Público Press (founded in 1979) and the activities of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project (established in 1992). The Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe (founded in 1974) is another long-standing periodical fundamental to the study of Latino literature. Primarily an academic journal of scholarly ar801

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ticles, book reviews, and interviews relating to bilingualism and to U.S. Hispanic literature, The Bilingual Review has not published the same volume of creative writing as did Revista ChicanoRiqueña and The Americas Review, despite a stated focus as a literary magazine. Even so, poetry appears in almost every issue (Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Martín Espada, and Judith Ortiz Cofer are among the poets represented) and is the subject of some of the research and interviews. More significant to the study of Latino poetry is Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, the press established by the journal in 1976. The extensive poetry backlist includes not only Chicanos of early distinction (Alurista, Alma Luz Villanueva, Tino Villanueva, and Bernice Zamora), but also Latinos of later periods (Marjorie Agosín, Elías Miguel Muñoz, Virgil Suárez, and Gina Valdés, for instance). Several anthologies published or distributed by the press, along with monographic issues of The Bilingual Review, contain representative Latino poetry in a variety of specialized categories. These include poets in New York (Los paraguas amarillos: Los poetas latinos en New York, 1983), poetry for or about young adults (Cool Salsa: Bilingual Poems on Growing Up Latino in the United States, 1994), and women poets (Floricanto Sí! A Collection of Latina Poetry, 1998). Such collections afford easy and important access to the vast and ever-flourishing numbers of Hispanic poets who have not gained the national prominence of the proportionately few better-publicized writers. Anthologies, like literary magazines, are an invaluable primary source of Chicano, Nuyorican, and Cuban American poetry. Early anthologies like Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner’s Aztlán: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature (1972) and Alurista’s Festival de Flor y Canto: An Anthology of Chicano Literature (1976) indicate that Chicano literature, including poetry, was already under critical consideration by the early 1970’s. (Virginia Ramos Foster annotates more than twenty-five such compilations from that decade in the Mexican American literature chapter of Sourcebook of Hispanic Culture in the United States, 1982, edited by David William Foster.) Several early anthologies of Puerto Rican and Nuyorican literature share the distinction of bringing together island and 802

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mainland writers, in seeming recognition of the ongoing aesthetic and literary historical connections between “the two islands,” Puerto Rico and Manhattan. (This concern exists to the present day for some scholars and compilers.) These compilations include Alfredo Matilla and Iván Silén’s The Puerto Rican Poets/Los poetas puertorriqueños (1972), María Teresa Babín and Stan Steiner’s Borinquen: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Literature (1974), and Julio Marzán’s Inventing a Word: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Puerto Rican Poetry (1980). Roberto Santiago has taken the same composite approach to Puerto Rican literature in Boricuas, Influential Puerto Rican Writers: An Anthology (1995). On the other hand, Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero’s landmark Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings (1975) documents exclusively the initial period of creativity and so is the best starting point for any retrospective study of Nuyorican poetry. The first Cuban American literature anthologies also emphasize the connections between writing in the United States and the homeland, Cuba. For example, several poets who write in Spanish in exile appear in Orlando Rodríguez Sardiñas’s La última poesía cubana: Antología reunida, 1959-1973 (1973; the latest Cuban poetry: an anthology) and exile poets are the exclusive focus of Angel Aparicio Laurencio’s Cinco poetisas cubanas, 1935-1969 (1970; five Cuban women poets); both collections were published in the United States. By the same token, an early critical dictionary, Bibliografía crítica de la poesía cubana (exilio: 1959-1971) (1972; critical bibliography of Cuban exile poetry), by exile writer Matías Montes Huidobro with Yara González, confirms that virtually all the poetry books of the decade under discussion were written in Spanish. The poetry in Silvia Burunat and Ofelia García’s Veinte años de literatura cubanoamericana: Antología 1962-1982 (1988; twenty years of Cuban American literature: an anthology) illustrates the tendency throughout two decades of exile and immigration to explore issues of identity within the context of the nascent Cuban American experience (and, in the 1970’s as in the preceding decade, in Spanish). Ultimately, the study of the Chicano, Nuyorican, or Cuban American poetry in the foregoing and similar anthologies provides a 803

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synopsis both of individual poets and of each discrete group, at specific moments as well as over time. Early Chicano Poetry Many of the poets featured in the early Chicano anthologies or in other publications continued to publish or to appear in later anthologies, suggesting their ongoing significance in Chicano literary history even as others emerged. These include Alurista, Angela de Hoyos, José Montoya, Luis Omar Salinas, Raúl Salinas, and Tino Villanueva. Rodolfo Gonzales’s I Am Joaquín/Yo soy Joaquín (1967) and the poetry of Ricardo Sánchez are especially representative of this early period. The bilingual I Am Joaquín/Yo soy Joaquín, by Denver-based activist and writer Gonzales, may be the single best-known Chicano poem of any period. It has been widely read, reproduced, and distributed by newspapers and magazines, students and teachers, performers, labor organizers, and Chicano organizations and organizers in every possible educational, cultural, political, and social milieu. I Am Joaquín is as much a historical commentary as a modern epic poem, and intentionally so. An early popular edition (Bantam Pathfinder, 1972) even supplemented the poem with paintings depicting historical events and a chronology of Mexican and Mexican American history. Also, as Gonzales himself states in the informative fact list that prefaces the poem, “I Am Joaquín was the first work of poetry to be published by Chicanos for Chicanos and is the forerunner of the Chicano cultural renaissance.” Gonzales combines the poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) as Joaquín, a Chicano Everyman, explores himself and the history of the Chicano people—from the pre-Columbian and colonial periods, through independence and revolution up to the present day: I am Joaquín, lost in a world of confusion, . . . . . . . . . . and destroyed by modern society. 804

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Repetition, enumeration, and parallelism dominate the poem’s short lines and long stanzas. The liberal use of displaced lines and capitalized words emphasizes key concepts, such as “MY OWN PEOPLE,” “THE GROUND WAS MINE,” and, in the prophetic and self-affirming final lines of the poem, “I SHALL ENDURE!/ I WILL ENDURE!” The late Ricardo Sánchez also began writing in social protest. The lines that frame “In Exile” (from Sánchez’s first book, Canto y grito mi liberación, 1971; I sing and shout my liberation) exemplify several of the salient characteristics of his poetry: the typographic hodgepodge and free verse, the sensation of getting out as much as possible in a single breath, and the vociferous sense of both self and people. it is by way of definition that i now write this short introduction of myself, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . and i write of my people, LA RAZA!

Elsewhere in this collection as in all his subsequent books, Sánchez frequently writes in Spanish or a mixture of Spanish and English, experiments with word formation (“soul/stream”; piensasentimientos, or “mindfeelings”; mentealmacuerpo, or mindsoulbody), inserts expository or poetic prose texts, and articulates his aesthetic and political visions. The enthusiasm and immediacy of his Beat-inflected voice readily draw the reader into the experience. Even the titles of Sánchez’s books and poems emphasize this aesthetic of spontaneity: “This of Being the Soul/ Voice for My Own Conscienceness Is Too Much (Petersburg, Virginny),” Hechizospells: Poetry/Stories/Vignettes/Articles/Notes on the Human Condition of Chicanos and Pícaros, Words and Hopes Within Soulmind (1976) and Eagle-Visioned/Feathered Adobes: Manito Sojourns and Pachuco Ramblings October 4th to 24th, 1981 (1990). Sánchez’s poetry has enjoyed wide circulation in both small and university presses, and has even been published in a private edition (Amerikan Journeys = Jornadas americanas, 1994, in Iowa City by publisher and longtime Sánchez associate Rob Lewis). The 805

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publication of Chicano Timespace: The Poetry and Politics of Ricardo Sánchez (2001), a scholarly monograph by Miguel R. López, establishes in no uncertain terms Sánchez’s position in the canon of Chicano—and, by extension, Latino and American—poetry. Nuyorican Poetry: 1970’s The beginnings of Nuyorican poetry were equally strident. The anthology edited by Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero, Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings (1975), introduced a wide audience to the recent poetry that was coming out of the experience of being Puerto Rican in New York City. Even the title of the anthology captures the emotive lyricism that underlies the use of an ethnic-specific lexicon (“Puerto Rican words”) to document a group experience (“[Puerto Rican] feelings”) in poetry inspired by a place (“Nuyorican poetry”). Several of the featured writers went on to distinguish themselves in poetry beyond the anthology, including Sandra María Esteves, José Angel Figueroa, Pedro Pietri, and the compilers themselves. (Two poets active in the early 1970’s, Victor Hernández Cruz and Tato Laviera, are not in the Nuyorican anthology.) The late Piñero, known more for the play Short Eyes (pr. 1974) than for his poetry, made a significant contribution nonetheless. The selections in the anthology exemplify his savage irreverence. In “The Book of Genesis According to Saint Miguelito,” for instance, Piñero derides the God who created ghettos, slums, lead-based paint, hepatitis, capitalism, and overpopulation. A later work, the much-anthologized “A Lower East Side Poem” (La Bodega Sold Dreams, 1980), covers similar ground as the poet contemplates dying among the pimping, shooting, drug dealing, and other unsavory activities of the neighborhood. The perverse but catchy refrain “then scatter my ashes thru/ the Lower East Side” affirms both Piñero’s allegiance to his barrio roots and the musical rhythms that inspire many Nuyorican poets. While social reality is a thematic interest and protest a dominant tone throughout Nuyorican Poetry, Algarín and Piñero clearly were committed to promoting diverse voices. The “dusmic” poetry of the third and final section of the book, for example, proposes the possibility of finding love, positive en806

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ergy, and balance. Esteves’s “Blanket Weaver” exemplifies this impulse: “weave us a song of many threads/ that will dance with the colors of our people/ and cover us with the warmth of peace.” (Some of Esteves’s later poems, such as those in Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo (1990), indicate a similarly broad array of preoccupations and interests; these include a touching elegy for the artist Jorge Soto, numerous love poems, and strong but poetic statements against brutal regimes in Guatemala and South Africa.) Also, Algarín’s introduction to the anthology, “Nuyorican Language,” constitutes an indispensable discussion of the poet and poetry in the Nuyorican context, in both theory and practice. Algarín, in fact, is located squarely in the mainstream of contemporary poetry and poetics. He has translated into English the poetry of Pablo Neruda, he has written extensively on poetics, and he has taken his literature classes from Rutgers University to the Passaic River and Paterson Falls to enhance his students’ study of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (1946-1958). The Nuyorican Poets Café, a cultural-arts venue Algarín founded in 1974, has broadened considerably the scope of its poetry and performance activities. One of many remarkable books to come out of the Nuyorican movement is Pedro Pietri’s Puerto Rican Obituary (1973), published by the progressive Monthly Review Press. In the title poem (which had achieved underground cult status long before its initial publication), the generic Puerto Ricans Juan, Miguel, Milagros, Olga, and Manuel trudge repeatedly through the daily routines in “Spanish Harlem” that only bring them closer to death and, ultimately, burial on Long Island. In the final analysis, only the afterlife and Puerto Rico offer respite from the poverty and discrimination suffered in New York: “PUERTO RICO IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE/ PUERTORRIQUENOS ARE A BEAUTIFUL RACE.” Pietri is at his best with the antiestablishment rhetoric with which he parodies religious and civic mainstays like the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance, as in “The Broken English Dream,” in which he pledges allegiance “to the flag/ of the united states/ of installment plans.” The contrast between New York and Puerto Rico—and between English and Spanish—underscores the irony of the political status 807

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of Puerto Ricans vis-à-vis the racial discrimination and linguistic choices awaiting them as they pursue the elusive American Dream. Cuban American Poetry: 1960’s-1970’s Spanish, not English, was the language of record for Cuban exile poets and Cuban American poets during the 1960’s and 1970’s, so language choice per se was not a conscious issue of either form or content, as it was for many Chicano and Nuyorican writers at that time. In fact, in contrast to the Nuyorican example, Cuban poetry in the United States of this early period often was seen as part of Cuban literature or Cuban exile literature elsewhere, not as a nascent branch of American ethnic literature. (Naomi Lindstrom analyzes this problem in the chapter on Cuban American and mainland Puerto Rican literature in Sourcebook of Hispanic Culture in the United States.) Even so, a number of individual poems anthologized by Silvia Burunat and Ofelia García in Veinte años de literatura cubanoamerica: Antología, 1962-1982 (1988; twenty years of Cuban American literature) illustrate the tendency to explore issues of identity within the context of Cuban exile in the United States. Uva Clavijo often defines her exile, as she does here in “Declaración” (declaration), in highly specific spatiotemporal terms: I, Uva A. Clavijo, . . . . . . . declare, today, the last Monday in September, that as soon as I can I will leave everything and return to Cuba.

The enumeration of what she is prepared to give up—a house in the suburbs, credit, a successful husband and beautiful family, perfect English (in short, all the trappings of the American Dream)—presents a striking contrast to the specificity and simplicity of this declaration. In “Al cumplir veinte años de exilio” (upon completing twenty years of exile), Clavijo commemorates that anniversary as any other, pondering the growth and development of a Spanish-speaking, Cuban self formed “before 808

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confronting/ an immigration official/ for the first time.” By the same token, Clavijo frames “Miami 1980” with very precise markers that pinpoint her loneliness and isolation: “Here, Miami, nineteen/ eighty, and my loneliness. . . .// And my astonishing loneliness.” The simplicity of Clavijo’s expressive and emotional needs in these poems might explain why she favors relatively short lines. In the Miami poem, for example, three especially significant lines succinctly capture the essence of the poem and the poet: “and hatred,” “in the distance,” and “loneliness.” For some Cuban American poets, the confrontation with New York is not unlike that of the Nuyoricans. In “Caminando por las calles de Manhattan” (walking through the streets of Manhattan), Alberto Romero meets with drug addicts, prostitutes, go-go dancers, and other marginal characters who people the streets of New York. Yet a sense of order and belonging pervades his search for God amid this riffraff: in the Jews of Astoria, in the Italians of Flatbush . . . in the Dominicans of 110th Street, in the South Americans of Queens, in the Cuban refugees.

Place influences identity for Lourdes Casal, too, who is “too much a Habanera to be a New Yorker,/ too much a New Yorker to be, . . . / anything else” (“Para Ana Veldford”). Despite some suggestive parallels with the Puerto Rican and Chicano experiences, however, the early Cuban American poetry written in Spanish was inaccessible to a broad readership of Latino literature. Moreover, the language factor has precluded the inclusion of these poets in English-language college textbooks like The Prentice Hall Anthology of Latino Literature (2002, edited by Eduardo del Rio). Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American Poetry: 1980’s-1990’s By the 1980’s and 1990’s, the diverse body of Latino literature by Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban writers in the United States 809

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was receiving considerable critical, popular, and pedagogical attention. As current compilers are quick to point out, Latino poets—including those trained in graduate writing programs— were being recognized more widely through national fellowships, prizes, and other honors and awards. They, like other American writers, were publishing in mainstream literary magazines like The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Parnassus, and Poetry. U.S. Latino literature in English was being included in general anthologies of American literature and in American literature curricula in North American colleges and universities. Gary Soto, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Jimmy Santiago Baca are some of the Chicano poets of broad acclaim and distribution at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Soto is not only one of the most prolific Latino poets but also probably the best known outside the confines of Chicano and Latino poetry. His sense of humor, the accessibility of his poetic language, and his sensitive portrayal of youth also have contributed to his success as a writer for young adults and children. (For many years Soto was virtually the only Chicano writing for the important youngadult market.) Like Soto, Chicana writer Pat Mora is a prolific poet and children’s author. She counts several books of poetry among her works in various genres, including Chants (1984), Borders (1986), Communion (1991), Agua Santa = Holy Water (1995), and Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints (1997). From her perspective as a woman and a Latina, Mora writes eloquently about diverse topics, including marriage, family life, and children; traditional and modern Latino and Mexican Indian culture; the Catholic devotion of saints; women; and the southwestern desert. In “Curandera” (folk healer) from Chants, for example, Mora interweaves several of these interests. When the villagers go to the healer for treatment, “She listens to their stories, and she listens/ to the desert, always to the desert.” In many other poems, Mora similarly portrays the nurturing qualities of the southwestern desert, as in “Mi Madre” (my mother), also from Chants, “I say teach me. . . . / She: the desert/ She: strong mother.” Like the traditional healer and the desertmother, the many women who populate Mora’s poems (the 810

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grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and granddaughters, the famous and the humble alike) tend to be strong, wise, and nurturing. That is not to say these women are uncritical, though. Extending the desert-woman metaphor in “Desert Women” (in Borders), Mora writes: “Don’t be deceived./ When we bloom, we stun.” The 1975 publication of Algarín and Piñero’s anthology Nuyorican Poetry helped pave the way for a later compilation of Puerto Rican writing, Faythe Turner’s Puerto Rican Writers at Home in the USA: An Anthology (1991). Turner includes poets of both generations and recognizes the significant expansion of the Puerto Rican literary diaspora outside of New York. The newer generation includes poets Martín Espada, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Rosario Morales, and Aurora Levins Morales. Espada’s poetry is informed variously by his own Puerto Rican heritage, experiences in the Latino enclaves of the United States, and radical causes in the United States and Latin America. Ortiz Cofer’s The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry (1993) invites the reader to negotiate a challenging but engaging combination of stories, essays, and poems that “tell the lives of barrio women.” Similarly experimental in composition is Morales and Levins Morales’s Getting Home Alive (1986), a mother-daughter collaboration of mixed genre (including poetry, poetic prose, and memoir), further distinguished by the intermingling of texts written by either mother or daughter. Significantly, the last piece, “Ending Poem,” is itself a collaborative product (as indicated by the distinct typefaces): I am what I am. A child of the Americas. A light-skinned mestiza of the Caribbean. A child of many diaspora, born into this continent at a crossroads.

These Caribbean women are not exclusively African or Taíno or European: “We are new . . . / And we are whole.” And their measured celebration of multiculturalism contrasts markedly with the earlier antipoetic angst of the Nuyorican experience. 811

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Unlike their predecessors, the new Cuban American poets write in English and as part of American, not Cuban, literature. Dionisio D. Martínez, for example, appears in the 1996 edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. In Little Havana Blues: A CubanAmerican Literature Anthology (1996), Delia Poey and Virgil Suárez have identified a corpus of sixteen recent poets, several of whom appear in many other groupings of canonical Latino or Cuban American poetry (among them Carolina Hospital, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Pablo Medina, and Gustavo Pérez Firmat). The poetry of scholar and writer Gustavo Pérez Firmat offers a good example of the new Cuban American poetry. As he explains in his memoir, Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano’s Coming-of-Age in America (1995): “Born in Cuba but made in the U.S.A., I can no longer imagine living outside American culture and the English language.” Much of Pérez Firmat’s English-language and bilingual poetry in Carolina Cuban (pb. in Triple Crown: Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban-American Poetry, 1987) and Bilingual Blues: Poems, 1981-1994 (1995) supports this notion. For example, he calls the Spanish-language preface to Carolina Cuban “Vo(I)ces,” in deceptively simple recognition of an anglophone self (I) located in between Spanish (voces) and English (voices). In the verse dedication to the same collection he ponders the paradox of writing in a language to which he does not “belong,” at the same time belonging “nowhere else,/ if not here/ in English.” Pérez Firmat explores the equivalence of language and place further in “Home,” in which home is as much a linguistic as a geographic construct: “[L]et him have a tongue,/ a story, a geography.” Bilingual wordplay at the service of identity is Pérez Firmat’s forte, as in “Son-Sequence”: “Son as plural being./ Son as rumba beat./ Son as progeny.” Suggestively, the confluence in this poem of language (son, “they are,” from the Spanish verb of being ser), culture (the Cuban son, a musical form), and ancestry (the English son or offspring) acknowledges some of the time-honored preoccupations of many Latino poets. End of the Twentieth Century In the 1980’s and 1990’s, the changing demographic patterns of Spanish-speaking immigrants combined with an ever-increasing 812

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interest in multicultural literature in both the marketplace and the classroom to bring broader recognition for Latino literature. Anthologies with a pan-Latino approach not only have brought together Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American writers but also have introduced new writers from other Latino backgrounds. Certainly Julia Alvarez, a Dominican born in New York City, is the most prominent of these writers (if for her fiction more than her poetry). As in her fiction, though, she has examined various problems of language and identity in her poetry (The Other Side/El otro lado [1995], Homecoming: New and Collected Poems [1996], and Seven Trees [1998]). Of special interest in Alvarez’s poetry and poetics is the interplay of identity, form, and the poetic tradition as she proposes new ways to approach set forms (the sonnet, the villanelle, and the sestina) that reflect her identity as a woman poet, a bilingual poet, and a Latina poet. The example of Alvarez underscores some significant developments in the field of Latino poetry since the publication of foundational works like I Am Joaquín and Puerto Rican Obituary. Latina poets, of course, receive more attention now than ever before. In addition, however, Latinas are included in the context of women poets in general. Similarly, anthologies and research have brought together Latinos and other poets on the basis of broad multicultural considerations. Some Latino poets also write for a young adult or children’s audience. Other configurations have incorporated Latino poetry into American diaspora literature, Jewish letters, border writing, or gay and lesbian literature. Perhaps the most sweeping trend is the approach championed by the research activities of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project: the inclusion of all Hispanic literature written in the United States, of all periods and in Spanish as well as in English. The project’s anthology Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (2002, edited by Nicolás Kanellos) reflects this objective. In fact, in this body of literature, Latino literature written in English is incorporated within the broader parameters of U.S. Hispanic literature. — Catharine E. Wall (including original translations) 813

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Learn More Cruz, Victor Hernández, Leroy V. Quintana, and Virgil Suarez, eds. Paper Dance: Fifty-five Latino Poets. New York: Persea, 1995. Notable for the inclusion of bicultural poets from numerous backgrounds, primarily Chicano and Mexican, Dominican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican, but also Colombian, Ecuadorian, and Guatemalan. González, Ray, ed. After Aztlan: Latino Poets of the Nineties. Boston: Godine, 1992. Prolific anthology editor González collects thirty-four “poets coming into their own in the eighties and nineties,” mostly Chicanos but also the leading Puerto Rican poets (Martín Espada, Victor Hernández Cruz, and Judith Ortiz Cofer). Kanellos, Nicolás, ed. Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. This multigenre anthology, which begins with the Spanish American colonial period, has an indispensable introduction and biobibliographical synopses of each of the more than 150 authors or anonymous works. Reflects the current status of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project and of Kanellos’s own contributions to the field. Lomelí, Francisco, ed. Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Literature and Art. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público and Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, 1993. An essential source with discrete essays (and extensive bibliographies) by experts on Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and Chicano literature; Hispanic aesthetic concepts; Latina writers; literary language; and Hispanic exile in the United States. The first of a four-volume set; the other three cover history, sociology, and anthropology. Milligan, Bryce, Mary Guerrero Milligan, and Angela de Hoyos, eds. ¡Floricanto Sí! A Collection of Latina Poetry. New York: Penguin, 1998. Brings together forty-seven both established and previously unknown or emerging Latina poets, including a few who write primarily in Spanish. These San Antonio-based writer-publishers had featured some twenty-five of the same writers in a previous compilation, Daughters of the Fifth Sun: A Collection of Latina Fiction and Poetry (1995). The insightful in814

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troductions to both collections elucidate aesthetic, thematic, critical, and bibliographic issues of Latina poetry and poetics in the 1990’s. Poey, Delia, and Virgil Suárez, eds. Little Havana Blues: A CubanAmerican Literature Anthology. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público, 1996. Features sixteen poets (mainly second-generation Cuban Americans) writing principally in English and from within the boundaries of American literature, as distinct from their literary forebears. A brief but informative introduction to the multigenre anthology outlines historical, chronological, aesthetic, and thematic considerations. Revista Chicano-Riqueña (1973-1985), continued by The Americas Review (1986-1999). These reviews published poetry (among other genres), scholarly articles and book reviews, interviews, and visual art. The foundational journal of Latino literature in both breadth and depth of coverage. Sánchez González, Lisa. Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Although this study focuses on narrative genres rather than on poetry, it illuminates the literary historical, cultural, and intellectual framework within which Nuyorican poetry has flourished.

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Latin American Poetry

T

he panorama of Latin American poetry spans five hundred years, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

From Encounter to the Colonial Era The first “Renaissance” in the New World (1492-1556) was the era of discovery, exploration, conquest, and colonization under the reign of the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabela and later Carlos V. The origins of Latin American literature are found in the chronicles of these events, narrated by Spanish soldiers or missionaries. The era of colonization during the reign of Philip II (1556-1598) was a second Renaissance and the period of the Counter-Reformation. During this time, Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga (1533-1594) wrote the first epic poem, La Araucana (1569-1589). The native saga narrated the wars between the Spanish conquistadors and the Araucano Indians of Chile. This is the first truly poetic literary work with an American theme. During the period of the Austrian Habsburg kings (15981701), this Renaissance was gradually replaced by the Baroque era. While the Golden Age of Spanish letters was declining in the Old World, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695) reigned supreme as the queen of colonial letters. She was the major poet during the colonial era. The autodidactic nun, who wrote plays and prose as well as poetry, was known as the tenth muse, la décima musa. Her poetic masterpiece, the autobiographical Primero sueño, combines Baroque elements with a mastery of Spanish and classical languages and her unique style. Her shorter poems capture popular Mexican culture, with its lyrical verse phrasing and native themes. Some of her most famous sonnets are “Este que ves, engaño colorido” (what you see [is] dark deception), “¿En perseguirme, mundo, qué interesas?” (in pursuing me, world, what interests you?), “Détente, sombra de mi bien esquivo” (stop, shadow of my elusive love), and “Esta tarde, mi bien, cuando te hablaba” (this afternoon, love, when I spoke to you). Her most recognized redondillas (or “roundelays,” stan816


zas of four octosyllabic lines rhyming abba) are “Este amoroso tormento” (this tormented love) and “Hombres necios, que acusáis” (stupid men, you accuse). Her charm and brilliance won her many wealthy and royal patrons. While she initially accepted their admiration, she died a recluse after rejecting her literary career and denouncing her precocious fame and vain pursuits. During the Wars of Independence (1808-1826), Neoclassicism and other French influences dominated literary production. Andrés Bello (1781-1865) is better known for his prose, but he was also a prolific verse writer who followed the European Neoclassical movement. He wrote the poems “Alocución a la poesía” and “La agricultura en la zona tórida” with American themes and European style. José María Heredia (1803-1839) was a Cuban exiled in Mexico and the United States who wrote about the beauty of the countries that adopted him. Romanticism characterized his poems about Niagara Falls, “Niágara,” Aztec ruins, “En el Teocalli de Cholula,” and other wonders such as a storm in “En una tempestad.” His ode “Himno a un desterrado” relates his experience as an exile in adopted nations. Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873) left Cuba to write in Spain because of the greater freedom she could enjoy there as a female poet. Romanticism influenced her poems about love, God, and her homeland, such as “Noche de insomnio y el alba” (night of insomnia and dawn), “Al partir” (upon leaving), and “Amor y orgullo” (love and pride). José Hernández (1834-1886) wrote about the Argentinean gauchos in El Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872; The Gaucho Martin Fierro, 1935) and La vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879; The Return of Martin Fierro, 1935). His Romantic verses followed the structures and lyrical rhythms of popular songs that romanticized the gauchos as a dying breed in the wake of industrialization. Modernismo By 1875, the roots of a poetic movement had grown into a new poetic era. The Latin American Modernistas were innovators and critics of the conservative thematic and stylistic structures that persisted from the colonial period. In Latin American society, 817


global industrialization, capitalism, North American cultural and economic imperialism, and Spain’s loss of all its colonies had a significant impact on artistic development. A definitive moment in the progress of the movement resulted from José Julián Martí’s publication of Ismaelillo in 1882. The poet and hero, who died fighting for Cuban independence (1853-1895), wrote Versos libres during this period, a collection that preceded Versos sencillos, published in 1891. All three collections characterized the existential angst of the era as they experimented with new lyrical forms and themes. Martí approached language as a sculptor approaches clay and molded words into new forms. His innovations have allowed him to be considered the first great visionary Latin American poet as he sought to define Nuestra América, a Latin American identity struggling for artistic as well as political and economic independence. Throughout the movement, the anguish, emptiness, and uncertainty of modernity provided a unifying thread for poets seeking innovation. The Mexican modernist Manuel Gutierrez Nájera (18591895), was a journalist renowned for his prose writings in his own time. He founded La Revista Azul, a literary review that promoted Modernismo throughout Latin America. His contemporary Rubén Darío (1867-1916), however, defined the Modernista poetic. Darío’s poetry was a reaction to the decadence of Romanticism in which he sought a unique voice while reinvigorating the Spanish language. He led a movement that borrowed themes popularized by the European Romantics and stylistic models of the French Parnassian movement. Darío not only was an instigator and initiator of the vindication of his language, but also served as a bridge to the second stage of Modernismo. His Azul (1888; blue), Cantos de vida y esperanza, los cisnes, y otros poemas (1905; songs of life and hope, the swans, and other poems), and Poema de otoño y otros poemas (1910; poem of autumn and other poems) represent Darío’s dynamic style, respect for beauty, search for harmonious words, and celebration of pleasure. Despite the decadence of his later poetry collections, Darío maintained confidence in the saving power of art and its use to protest against social and historical injustices and resolve 818


existential enigmas. The Modernistas defended humanism in the face of economic progress and international imperialism, which devaluated art. They elevated art as an end in itself. Leopoldo Lugones (1874-1938) was the major Argentinean Modernista poet. His poems “Delectación morosa,” “Emoción aldeana,” and “Divagación lunar” lament ephemeral beauty captured and immortalized by perfectly placed words. Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938) was influenced by postmodernist tendencies. Her intense verse experimented with Symbolism and other twentieth century innovations. Her vivid sensual poems include “Tú me quieres blanca,” “Epitafio para mi tumba,” “Voy a dormir,” “Hombre pequeñito,” and “Fiera de amor.” The Uruguayan Delmira Agustini (1886-1914) wrote intensely emotional and erotic poems that highlighted the dualities of human nature. Pleasure and pain, good and evil, love and death create and maintain verbal tension. These opposites struggle for dominance in poems such as “La musa,” “Explosión,” and “El vampiro.” All of these individual elements come together in these poets’ faith in the artistic power of the word. This autonomous aesthetic power opposed the fin de siglo (turn of the century) angst resulting from industrialism, positivism, and competing ideologies. While reflecting on their predecessors, the Modernistas created original verse with unique usage of sometimes archaic or exotic words. The language was sometimes luxurious and sensual, adapting classical and baroque usage, from elements of the Parnassians to those of the Pre-Raphaelites to the Art Nouveau and European Symbolist movements and tendencies of decadent Romanticism. The symbolic impact of words characterized the movement as a whole. This all-encompassing factor defines the movement and its existential nature. This poetry is the living expression of an era of spiritual crises, personal and societal anguish, and uncertainty about the future of art as well as humanity’s direction as it embarked upon the twentieth century. Postmodernism and the Vanguard No exact date marks the transition from Latin American Modernism to postmodernism or to a vanguard movement. A com819


bination of historical and societal factors influenced the artistic development of individual Latin American countries. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, World War I and the Mexican Revolution interrupted artistic and literary exchange between the Old World models and the New World innovators. The urban bourgeoisie, who were patrons of the arts, were displaced. The United States had gradually replaced the European masters in science and industry as well as politics, and its dominance permeated all levels of Latin American society. Altazor (wr. 1919, pb. 1931), by Chilean Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948), marks a break with the past. Huidobro originated stylistic practices never seen before in Latin American poetry. In creacionismo, his personal version of creationism, he sought to create a poem the way nature made a tree. His words, invested with autonomous linguistic and symbolic significance, reinvent themselves by creating a world apart from other words. They are antilyrical, intellectual, and disconnected from emotional and spiritual experience. Nevertheless, Huidobro’s world, created by his unique use of words, was a human creation because in it the poet experiences alienation and existential angst. Huidobro’s poems “Arte poética,” “Depart,” and “Marino” voice his despair in isolation. Huidobro had a significant influence on younger poets, particularly in his development of a school of thought that centered on the theory of Ultraísmo, which attempted to construct alternative linguistic choices to those offered by the external world. Ultraísmo synthesized Latin American with Spanish and European tendencies. Among those influenced by Ultraísmo were Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), and in fact Borges became its main proponent. While his short stories have repeatedly caused him to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, his poetry reveals a linguistic expertise and lyrical genius unparalleled by his contemporaries. He believed that lyricism and metaphysics united to justify the means of the poetic process. This fusion provides the genesis of his most representative poems, “Everything and Nothing,” “Everness,” “Laberinto,” “Dreamtigers,” and “Borges y yo.” 820


The Peruvian César Vallejo (1892-1938) developed a unique and distinctive poetic voice. His Los heraldos negros (1918; The Black Heralds, 1990), Trilce (1922; English translation, 1973), and Poemas humanos (1939; Human Poems, 1968) demonstrate the impossibility of mutual communication and comprehension, the absurdity of the human condition, and the inevitability of death. In 1945, Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) was the first Latin American writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her verses echo the folksongs and traditional ballads of her native Chile, the Caribbean, and Mexico. They naturally blend native dialects with Castilian in a lyrical fusion. Some of her best poems include “Sonetos a la muerte,” “Todos íbamos a ser reinas,” “Pan,” and “Cosas.” Mistral’s countryman Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) also won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1971. During his formative years he was influenced by Modernismo, experimenting with various styles while serving as an international diplomat. The last stage of his poetry was marked by didacticism and political themes, and he was exiled for his activity in the Communist Party. Neruda sought to create a forum for “impure” poetry that encompassed all experience. His Canto general (1950) voiced his solidarity with humanity in his political and poetic conversion. Odas elementales (1954; The Elemental Odes, 1961) continued his mission of solidarity with the humblest members of creation. Other landmark collections include Los versos del capitán (1952; The Captain’s Verses, 1972) and Cien sonetos de amor (1959; One Hundred Love Sonnets, 1986). Neruda believed that America and clarity should be one and the same. The Mexican literary generation known as the Taller was led by Octavio Paz (1914-1998). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990 for his brilliant prose and poetry that defined the Mexican culture and connected its isolation and universality to other cultures. His landmark analysis of poetic theory is proposed in El arco y la lira (1956; The Bow and the Lyre, 1971). The poetic evolution of linguistic progression considered “signs in rotation” culminated in Piedra de sol (1957; Sun Stone, 1963) and synthesized all twentieth century poetic theories into a 821


highly original yet distinctly Mexican work. Representative poems include “Himno entre ruinas,” “Viento entero,” and “La poesía.” The Chilean poet Nicanor Parra (born 1914) developed a unique yet popular style. He called his poems antipoemas for their super-realism, sarcasm, self-criticism, and humor. Parra’s poetry speaks to the masses and rejects pretension, as the poet revitalizes language and innovates with words in action. His masterwork, Poemas y antipoemas (1954; Poems and Antipoems, 1967), epitomizes antirhetorical and antimetaphorical free verse. “Soliloquio del individuo” and “Recuerdos de juventud” are representative. The work of Sara de Ibañez (1910-1981) represents the antithesis of fellow Uruguayan Delmira Agustini. Her intellectual and metaphysical themes and neoclassical style allude to the poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Golden Age masters such as Spain’s Luis de Góngora y Argote. Love and death are analyzed in “Isla en la tierra,” “Isla en la luz,” “Liras,” and “Soliloquios del Soldado.” The “impure” poetry of Ernesto Cardenal (born 1925) unites political ugliness and the beauty of the imagination. It is characterized by exteriorismo, a technique that incorporates propaganda, sound bites, advertisements, and fragments of popular culture into poetry that seeks to convert and enlighten. The aesthetic value of these poems is not overshadowed by their political and spiritual message. Representative collections include La hora O (1960), Salmos (1967; The Psalms of Struggle and Liberation, 1971), Oración por Marilyn Monroe y otros poemas (1965; Marilyn Monroe and Other Poems, 1975), and Cántico cósmico (1989; The Music of the Spheres, 1990; Cosmic Canticle, 1993). Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974) is best known for her novels and essays about social injustice in her native Chiapas. Because she focused on the status of women within the Mayan culture, as well as within Mexican society as a whole, she was considered a feminist. Her poetry and prose are concerned with the human condition, not only with the plight of women. Her most representative poems are “Autorretrato,” “Entrevista de Prensa,” and “Se habla de Gabriel.” 822


Thematically and stylistically more militant and radical, Rosario Ferré (born 1938) writes overtly feminist poetry utilizing elements of symbolism and irony. Her poems include “Pretalamio,” “Negativo,” “La prisionera,” and “Epitalamio.” As editor of a literary journal, Ferré introduced feminist criticism to Latin American literature. Movements on a smaller national scale characterize presentday poetry. They are characterized by experimental, politically and socially conscious efforts. The twenty-first century heralds the work of los nuevos, the new poets whose work is linked to national as well as international issues. Individual postvanguard poets do not identify with particular ideologies. The poetry of Argentineans Mario Benedetti (born 1920) and Juan Gelman (born 1930) deals with personal exile as well as the universal experience of exile. Since the 1980’s, women have emerged with empowered poetry that serves as liberation from oppression. Poets including Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972), Rosario Murillo (born 1951), Giaconda Belli (born 1948), Claribel Alegría (born 1924), Juana de Ibarbourou (18951979), and Ana Istarú (born 1960) have given voice to the silent struggles of women striving to realize their potential in a maledominated society. Poetry written during the last twenty years of the twentieth century focused on oppression and exile. The focus upon the withdrawal from history as a condition for the poetry of Octavio Paz has shifted to the poet belonging in the historical moment so that poetry has a public place and common concern. Contemporary Latin American poetry has become the process of naming the word and rewriting history in a lived world. The making of that world is the creative act that celebrates the word. — Carole A. Champagne Learn More Agosín, Marjorie. These Are Not Sweet Girls: Latin American Women Poets. Fredonia, N.Y.: White Pine Press, 1994. Agosín is a prolific and influential poet as well as a distinguished professor and literary critic. This volume from the Secret Weavers series focuses on the poetic production of Hispanic women 823


since the advent of feminism as expressed through their work, written predominantly during the last thirty years of the twentieth centurty. Agosín edited the collection and translated the poems in this bilingual volume. Gauggel, Karl H. El cisne modernista: Sus orígenes y supervivencia. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. This study examines an icon of Latin American Modernismo: the swan, and its multitude of connotations. Gauggel examines its manifestations in the work of Darío, Lugones, Julio Herrera y Reissig, and Ricardo Jaimes Freyre, among other poets. He explores their roots in the Renaissance and the Spanish Golden Age, as well as neoclassical poets. Gauggel illustrates how poetic traditions were maintained by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and other New World poets. This is a fascinating literary adventure spanning several centuries of literary history. In Spanish. Gonzalez, Mike, and David Treece. The Gathering of Voices: The Twentieth Century Poetry of Latin America. New York: Verso, 1992. This study addresses a wide range of topics. The contradictions of Latin American Modernismo are explored, including its elements of shock and despair that distinguished it from its predecessors. The roots of the Vanguard movement are examined, and the enduring poetry of Neruda is discussed in detail. Special topics are discussed, such as Brazilian Modernismo and the Guerrilla Poets of Cuba. The work concludes with studies of Postmodernism in Brazil and Spanishlanguage poets in exile. The collaboration between Gonzalez and Treece offers a wide variety of topics and approaches to over a century of poetry. Green, Roland Arthur. Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. This volume offers insight into Spanish colonialism, European imperialism, and their influences upon literature. Colonial love poetry is analyzed within its sociopolitical and historical contexts. Chapters are devoted to Sor Juana’s fascinating life and works. This illustrated volume provides an extensive list of bibliographical references. Jiménez, José Olivio, ed. Antología crítica de la poesía modernista hispano-Americana. Madrid: Ediciones Hiperión, 1985. This 824


critical anthology discusses the corpus of the most prominent Modernista poets. Jiménez is recognized as an authority on Latin American poetry. While Darío’s poetry is the primary work, Martí, Lugones, Herrera y Reissig, and Agustini are highlighted. Jiménez lays the groundwork for a thorough understanding of Modernismo with a substantial introduction and detailed presentations of each poet. In Spanish. _______. Antología de la poesía hispanoamericana contemporánea, 1914-1970. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1984. This anthology continues where Jiménez left off by describing the decadence of Modernismo and the origins of several vanguard movements. The first movement was initiated by Vicente Huidobro, and the second stage was characterized by Neruda. Jiménez also discusses several postvanguard developments in the evolution of Latin American poetry. This collection is one of the most complete anthologies of postmodernist poetry. In Spanish. Ortega, Julio, ed. Antología de la poesía latinoamericana del siglo XXI: El turno y la transición. México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1997. Ortega gathers together some of the newest voices in Latin American poetry, including writers who bridge the gap between the postmodernist era and the present. These poets carry on the poetic tradition while breaking with their predecessors stylistically and thematically. Ortega admits that the endurance of their poetry will be tested by time and circumstance. In Spanish. Rowe, William. Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and the Inner Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. This study discusses contemporary Latin American poets who bridge the centuries, including Nicanor Parra, Carmen Ollé, and Ernesto Cardenal. Rowe explores two major influences on late twentieth century and early twenty-first century poetry: the avant-garde movement and politically motivated poetic writing. He examines these roots from contextual and historical perspectives. Smith, Verity. Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1996. This reference of nearly one thou825


sand pages contains essays of at least fifteen hundred words on major poets, novelists, dramatists, other writers, movements, concepts, and other topics relating to South American, Central American, and Caribbean (including Spanish, French, and English) literatures. Overview essays cover literatures of individual countries, eras, and themes (such as science fiction, children’s literature, and indigenous literatures), as well as the literatures of the major U.S. Latino communities: Cuban, Mexican, and Puerto Rican. Sonntag Blay, Iliana L. Twentieth-Century Poetry from Spanish America: An Index to Spanish Language and Bilingual Anthologies. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1998. Three indexes provide access to more than twelve thousand Latin American poems from seventy-two anthologies: an author index, a title index, and an index of first lines. An important reference for serious scholars. Spooner, David. The Poem and the Insect: Aspects of Twentieth Century Hispanic Culture. San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1999. This study examines the historical and literary contexts of poetic work spanning several continents, from Spain to South and Central America, then to Mexico and the United States. Spooner first discusses the work of Federico García Lorca, Antonio Machado, Pedro Salinas, and other Spanish poets. He connects the Old World to the New with analyses of Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz. Spooner also discusses the innovative work of less well known poets, including Delmira Agustini. He offers some original ideas about some familiar poems. Tapscott, Stephen, ed. Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. This is the first bilingual collection of the most important Latin American poets. Portuguese as well as Spanish poems are translated, and the selections cover the full range of the century, from the Modernistas to the postmoderns, the vanguardists, and contemporary political and experimental poetry. Tapscott provides background material and introductions to eighty-five poets in a well-organized volume with excellent translations. 826


Unruh, Vicky. Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. This study focuses on the context and the character in the vanguard movements throughout Latin America. Unruh believes that the Vanguardia was a form of activity rather than a set of poems with similar characteristics. She demonstrates how the vanguard movement emphasized action in art and how vanguard poetry served as creative action. This perspective sheds new light on the poets’ lives as well as their creative acts. Yurkievich, Saúl. Suma crítica. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997. Yurkievich is one of the most highly regarded critics of Latin American literature. His analyses have provoked critical response and thoughtful discussion since the 1980’s. He delves into the work of the Modernistas, including Darío, Lugones, Ramon López Velarde, and Gabriela Mistral. His analyses of vanguardista poetry address the work of Huidobro, Vallejo, and Neruda. He then demonstrates how the poetry of Borges and Paz goes beyond the limits of the vanguard movement. Yurkievich is a consistently brilliant literary critic. In Spanish.

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Latino Short Fiction

W

hile the popularity of short fiction in the twentieth century has been evidenced in the sheer volume of story anthologies, literary magazines, and copious production of collections by major artists, such as Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, and Donald Barthelme, the short fiction of Latinos rarely made an appearance before the late twentieth century. Large presses generally carried few or no works by Latino writers; mainstream and smaller literary magazines—primarily located on the East Coast and attuned to literature by Anglo men—believed there was no market for Latino stories. In fact, there was little appearance of Latino short fiction until mid-century; the genre began to create inroads into the Latino community (in fact, creating its own readership) only in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, and the publication of short stories by Latino authors became robust in the 1980’s. With the establishment of journals such as The Americas Review (formerly Revista Chicano-Riqueña) and of presses such as Arte Público in Texas, which focused on writing by Latinos, a tradition of publication and distribution of short fiction began. As a result, the latter two decades of the twentieth century saw an explosion in the writing and publication of short fiction by Latinos and an exponential interest on the part of the public at large. Several works of Chicano and Latino fiction found their way into major literary anthologies and onto required reading lists in high school and college English classes. However, despite the evidence of greater accessibility and acceptability by the literary world at large, Latino fiction is still, in many ways, separated from Anglo-American, or “mainstream,” literature and literary studies. Latino fiction merits study as a serious field now, and with the emphasis on multicultural studies and the examination of historical and sociopolitical forces in literature, it can be informative and valuable to look at works from an ethnic perspective in order to see how specific ethnic or cultural identification affects literary trends and themes.

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Latinos are forecast to be the largest minority group in the United States in the twenty-first century. As literary production in the Latino community blossoms and as the U.S. Latino population has increased, there has been a significant increase in attention to “border” studies within the larger fields of American literature and cultural studies. Scholars and critics have begun to pay attention to the cultural dynamics of the U.S.-Mexican border, noting the exchange of influences and ideas. Prominent American studies and English professors such as José David Saldívar, Lois Parkinson Zamora, and Amy Kaplan have argued that scholars cannot consider the category “American literature” without taking into account all the Americas— North, South, and Central. At the same time, academic interest in the field of postcolonial studies requires a consideration of the relationship between the United States and its Caribbean neighbors, in terms of considering both the territory of each as colonized land following New World settlement and the participation of the United States in neocolonial relation to Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and other Caribbean island nations. Among the results of this new focus is a fresh approach to a wide field of literature, including fiction by Chicanos and Latinos living in the United States. What Is Latino Fiction? In the sense discussed in this essay, “Latino” fiction includes works by writers in the United States who have either migrated from Latin America or are descendants of Latin Americans. Further, it can be argued that Latino writers are distinct in their linguistic, cultural, historical, and political sensibilities, and that their concerns frequently echo those of the community to which they belong. Still, the terms at times overlap and a word on usage is in order. While the term “Latino” is inclusive, meaning those from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, the term “Chicano” is frequently employed when discussing those of Mexican or Mexican American heritage; Chicano/Latino is used when being both inclusive and mindful of distinctions therein. This article will avoid using the common term “Hispanic,” which designates those whose linguistic origin 829


is Spanish. This term is controversial, since many Latino groups claim that it is an outgrowth of U.S. governmental policies of foreign and domestic containment, overlooking the cultural diversity of the different Latino nations, and that, further, it inaccurately lays its claim in Spain and the Iberian peninsula, thereby eliding the history of colonization and its subsequent cultural manifestations. Therefore, “Latino” and the feminine form “Latina” are preferred by many, being a reference to geographic origin, Latin America. While it is always problematic to assign a single term to a group that is far from homogeneous, it is the work of the scholar to locate the similarities that justify its usage, all the while attending to the cultural differences inherent in the field. Below, the aim is to do just that by tracing common themes, investigating their origins, and looking at particular authors and works that are notable for illustrating those themes. The Latino Short-Story Form Though not traditionally the dominant genre—novels and poetry have been more prevalent—the short-story form is particularly expressive for Chicano and Latino writers. The dramatic diversity and hybridity of Chicano and Latino life, and the tensions created by cultural flux, make apt material for the conventions of short fiction. It is no coincidence that some of the most influential works by Chicanos and Latinos are collections of short stories, such as experimental work by Tomás Rivera and the groundbreaking fiction of Sandra Cisneros. Rivera’s and Cisneros’s works are especially dependent on the accessibility and flexibility of the short-story genre, because both weave together a patchwork of narratives, a polymorphous collection of voices to articulate the lives of Latinos—an ethnic American group that is complex and varied. These and other writers have been able to express the complexities yet demonstrate the thematic concerns and stylistic sensibilities that make a particular work of short fiction distinctly Latino. One of those distinctions is language. Many Chicanos and Latinos are fully bilingual or at least participate in more than one linguistic community. This Spanish-English bilingualism is 830


directly addressed in many works of short fiction. While a few writers, such as Sabine Ulibarrí, were published in Spanish first, countless others demonstrate this bilingualism through the use of Spanish in the text via the insertion of “Spanglish,” or anglicization of Spanish words, and frequent code-switching—that is, the act of alternating between or using the two languages at once, often in the same sentence or phrase. Although the English-language reader is usually able to fully comprehend these insertions through contextual clues or immediate translation, sometimes meaning is obscured for the readers who are not bilingual. Customs and culture also play a large role in Latino short fiction. The inclusion of religious ritual, local legend, and popular folklore, much of which is unfamiliar to non-Latino or mainstream readers, finds its way into a number of works. For the Latino writer, the delineations between fact and fantasy, dream and reality, legend and “truth” can sometimes be seen as arbitrary divisions, leading the work of writers such as Rudolfo Anaya to be labeled “Magical Realism.” Many regional writers include particular myths, stories, and Catholic practices in their stories, as most of Latin America is Roman Catholic. Cisneros’s story “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” for example, consists of a series of written thanks and descriptions of offerings, or retablos to various saints and the Virgin Mary, a custom particular to many Mexican Americans. Such customs and cultural practices, however, usually take place against the backdrop of a larger society, the United States, and so the stories at once represent cultural differences while negotiating the merging of AngloAmerican U.S. and Latino cultures. This negotiation leads to a preoccupation with geography in the literature. Latinos can be border-dwellers and bordercrossers by virtue of the fact that they frequently have more than one national or cultural allegiance. Among these affiliations, Latinos are variously tied to New York, the Southwest, Chicago, or Texas in the United States and countries as culturally distinct as Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, or the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. Additionally, Latino writers in the United States often write as exiles or as part of a larger diaspora, thereby evok831


ing problematic sentiments of home, loyalty, cultural merging, and assimilation. For example, the Cubans, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans (or Nuyoricans) who have established themselves in the Northeast commonly write about the conflict between being part of the island culture, the land of their birth or ancestors, and life on the mainland. Different latitudes foster different attitudes, and these writers often contrast the harsh life in urban cities with tropical island living. The Chicanos of the Southwest integrate the landscape and its history of Anglo domination into the prose where it figures as either plot or character. Latino writers, therefore, are often deeply connected to the land they inhabit—either by native legacy or the attachments fostered by recent immigration—but cultural affiliations disrupt conventional national affiliations as regional terms like “Tejano” (a Mexican American from Texas) or “Californio” suggest, and so the site of Chicano/Latino narrative is physically and psychically shifting. This continual shifting creates a tension in much of Latino short fiction, a tension that expresses itself in the duality of many of the characters as they struggle to be both Latino and North American, as they try to be at home in their barrios and comfortable in the world at large, and as they attempt to resist the pressures of an English-speaking world where racism still exists and cultural difference is not necessarily seen as an asset. Thus, assimilation and resistance to cultural dominance, along with themes of departure and return (and the migrant nature of culture) all play into the short fiction produced by Latinos in the United States. Clearly these are problems or issues that individuals encounter alone, and Chicano and Latino literature certainly portrays the single subject finding his or her way in two worlds, but these questions are vexing for the community at large; Latino characters are nearly always departing from or moving toward a reconciliation with a broader community. Indeed, perhaps the most notable and compelling feature of Chicano and Latino short fiction is the indelible sense of responsibility characters are shown to have for their respective communities. 832


Early Influences While short fiction is a relatively recent phenomenon in Latino literature, it is useful to discuss the trajectory of the literature in general, before the appearance of the short story, in order to review the thematic concerns of Latino fiction and see how it is entwined with political history. Latino literature in the United States has a long history that is distinct from the Anglo-American tradition. In the early history of this country, Latino literature was written in Spanish and looked to Spanish-language traditions for literary inspiration. The literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and much of the eighteenth centuries, for example, mainly consisted of writings by the Spanish who settled in the New World and were chronicles of travels, memoirs, and letters, with some poetry and drama, as was typical of this time. Such works are now viewed as “American” works and are included in anthologies of U.S. literature, but set in context they stand out as antecedents to today’s Latino fiction. A New World tradition of recounting and recording oral legends and myths, for example, combined with Spanish balladry prefigured much of the storytelling in forms such as the Mexican corrido that was to come. It is during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the territory now known as the United States began to take shape in what had been Hispanic territories. In 1821, Florida was ceded to the United States, and in 1848, with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico lost about a third of its territory including Alta California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Despite a great influx of Anglos to the region, Spanish remained the dominant language of the Southwest as the Mexican population struggled to remain in control of their property and culture. After the Spanish-American War of 1898, Cuba and Puerto Rico came under U.S. control, precipitating one of the first waves of Caribbean immigration into the Northeast and the South. Additionally, a wave of Mexican immigrants came into the country, concentrating in the Southwest after the Mexican Revolution of 1910—some to escape the war, others in search of economic opportunities in the western United States. 833


During these turbulent decades the Latino literary world expanded tremendously and began to give voice to the concerns that are still being addressed in short fiction today. Fiction, however, was the slowest literary form to develop during this period, after memoirs, histories, chronicles, ballads, and poetry. According to Chicano literary scholar Raymund Paredes . . . [The Treaty of] Guadalupe Hidalgo had guaranteed MexicanAmericans frill rights as citizens but, in fact, they were frequently stripped of their property and subjected to severe discrimination. The Mexican-Americans expressed their resentment of this treatment in the large number of corridos that sprang from this region.

The corrido, a border-based ballad form, became the preeminent narrative genre in the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries along the border and was used to describe the sequence of domination and resistance between Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest. Likewise, the Chicano fiction produced during this time took as its subject the land, its people, and its history. In California, Adolfo Carrillo published short stories and legends about the California missions and the gold rush. Eusebio Chacón, of New Mexico, published romantic novellas before the turn of the century. Urbano Chacón and his son, Felipe Chacón, were newspaper editors in New Mexico. Felipe published a number of short stories in his newspaper and in books; however, this work was in Spanish as were many of the literary contributions around the turn of the century. In fact, during this time, numerous Spanish-language newspapers were circulating, a large number of which carried poetry, stories, ballads, and serialized novels. El Misisipi, based in New Orleans, was probably the first Spanish-language newspaper in the United States. Other notable dailies and weeklies included La Gaceta of Santa Barbara, the literary magazine Aurora, and La Prensa, a newspaper which created its own weekly literary supplement. While much literary activity was centered on the Southwest and the former Mexican territories, in the Northeast, primarily New York, the cronistas, or newspaper columnists from 834


Spanish-speaking communities, sought to nurture the cultural life of their groups of origin, most of which hailed from the Caribbean. Though there is little evidence that short fiction was produced by that community during the early part of the century, the seeds were sown for literary artistry in these newspapers. The Advent of Latino Short Fiction There are several authors from the first half of the twentieth century who have presaged the thematic concerns of Latino authors to follow and have received notice for their fiction. Josefina Niggli, who was born and lived in Mexico (though not to Mexican parents) is now generally considered one of the precursors of Chicano writers. Her best-selling story series of 1945, Mexican Village, charmingly and richly describes the Mexican town of Hidalgo and its people, yet at its center lies the issue of race: The reappearing protagonist of the stories is a half-Anglo, half-Mexican man who is rejected by his white father. Mario Suárez is one of the first writers to have used the term “Chicano” in print. His stories, many of which were published around mid-century, take Arizona as their scene; he describes the barrio in Tucson, replete with details about regional life, such as cultural customs that demonstrate the bridge between the ways of old Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. Though he did not publish abundantly, his realism and sympathetic portrayals of Chicanos have earned him respect as an early Chicano fiction writer. A Franciscan priest born Manuel Chávez, Fray Angélico Chávez was a prolific writer who wrote historical narratives, as well as tracts on history and religion. The three stories that form New Mexico Triptych from 1940, combined with his other fictional works, have been compiled in The Short Stories of Fray Angélico Chávez (1987). Chávez draws inspiration from traditional hispano, or Southwest Mexican and Mexican American, Spanishlanguage stories. These stories are characterized by the use of provincial characters and situations, archetypal and religious narrative elements, and allegorical structures. The stories, considered by many to be quaint and charming renderings of the 835


Hispanos, or Spanish-speakers of New Mexico, are the subject of much critical attention. While drawing upon the religious customs and folklore of the region, Chávez takes on the social reality of the long process of transition from Mexican cultural norms in the Southwest and the inevitable cultural clashes that arose, illuminating the condescension of the Anglo-American toward the Mexican American. As the collection’s editor, Genaro Padilla has put it, the stories present a “whimsical, romantic and mystic surface” to life in New Mexico, which is “quietly undermined by social criticism.” Américo Paredes, too, was writing about the American experience from a Mexican American perspective in the 1920’s through the 1950’s. Paredes, who is best known for his ethnographic work on Mexican and Mexican American folklore, nonetheless published a number of short stories distinctive for their spare, realistic, and dialogic prose and contemporary contexts. Collected in The Hammon and the Beans, and Other Stories (1994), these stories examine Chicano life from many social perspectives and take the reader from South Texas to Japan, from the Depression through World War II. The wide range of subjects and narrative points of view represent Paredes’s view that the Chicano, no local or accidental cultural phenomenon, could be understood only in his or her relation to the United States and the world at large. According to literary critic Ramón Saldívar, The Hammon and the Beans, and Other Stories, along with Paredes’s scholarly work, constitutes “a figural discourse of transnational epic proportions appropriate to the construction of a new narrative of a modern American social and cultural history.” The title piece of Paredes’s collection, “The Hammon and the Beans,” is set in the 1920’s, takes place in a small town with a military base, and portrays the interweaving of the lives of sanctioned citizens, the military, with those marginalized on the border. In the story, a small Mexican-populated Texas town butts up against a U.S. military base. Focusing on the children of the town, the story shows the process by which the quotidian culture of Anglo-Americans is passed along to those on the margins. One little girl spies on the soldiers while they eat and steals their scraps for her family. Her playmates goad her into performing 836


the banalities of the army mess hall with mock orations, at once for their own amusement and to master the discourse and interests of the dominant culture. The children realize they must learn English to survive in America but can do so only through subversion. In a telling episode, the young girl stands before her peers and mimics—with notable linguistic revision—the gruntings of hungry soldiers whom she has spied in the base mess hall: “Give me the hammon and the beans! give me the hammon and the beans!” The story ends with the narrator, now a young adult standing in food lines during the depression, thinking about the young girl and the (in)efficacy of her demand for food, which he now reads as a call for justice. The story is remarkable and characteristic of the collection as a whole in the way it represents the tangle of official vehicles of oppression— the military on the border—with quotidian lives, the lives of the hungry border-dwellers. The short fiction of Paredes, along with that of Chávez, is preoccupied with life in the borderlands of the American Southwest during these decades, though in stylistically very different ways. However different the stories may read, they demonstrate that these concerns—those of geography, the concept of home, and social justice—are relevant to the Chicano/Latino community both then and now. Contemporary Works and Authors Contemporary Latino literature gains its unique voice from the civil rights struggles in the 1960’s in general and the academic protests by Chicanos and Latinos in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s in particular. The Chicano movement, or El Movemiento as it was called in local circles, was a grassroots protest movement based in Texas and parts of the Southwest which called for equality and integration in schools, a fair language program that respected the primacy of Spanish in the homes of Chicano and Latino students, and a more balanced view of the history of the region. The movement made strong political gains for Chicanos and Latinos, and it also sparked a social and cultural awakening, providing the inspiration and the symbolism for much of the literature that would follow. The Chicano movement high837


lighted the rights of Chicanos and Latinos to their language, their cultural past, and their (symbolic) sovereignty over their land. These themes show up in the efflorescence of literature and the deep commitment to artistic production and expression that followed. Chicano/Latino writers were less concerned during this time with the literary experimentation that was taking place among mainstream writers of the period and more concerned with thematic problems of identity, racial discrimination, immigration, and socioeconomic repression. Tomás Rivera’s . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971; . . . and the earth did not part) and The Harvest: Short Stories (1989) find a home in these thematic concerns. Considered a classic of Chicano fiction, . . . and the earth did not part was published initially in Spanish and then as a bilingual work, with side-by-side English and Spanish versions of the text. This book consists of fourteen stories, twelve of which correspond to the months of the year, divided by thirteen vignettes. The stories piece together the life of a nameless boy over that year, a working-class character who embodies the collective voice of migrant workers—a group whose stories had rarely graced the pages of literature. A prayer for a son in Vietnam, a boy suffering from thirst in the fields, and the ostracization of migrant Mexican schoolchildren in the classroom are the focuses of some of the pieces. The short, fragmentary pieces that make up the whole, combined with the bilingual presentation of the text, echo the fragmentation of identity of people caught between two cultures. The work is considered to be a tremendous influence on Chicano/ Latino writers who followed him, such as Sandra Cisneros. The characters in Rivera’s collection The Harvest, too, lead lives that mirror the experimental, minimalist prose. Rivera’s stories, like his subjects’ lives, are nonlinear, as characters migrate according to the season and live at the mercy of the growers who employ them. The characters are divested of conventional forms of agency, and so it is not their actions that determine the plot of the stories but the sudden and fatalistic whims of nature and economics. Rivera expresses the humanity of his subjects through their enduring commitment to one another and through their attempts to make meaning of their 838


landscape and their lives. Again, and as will be seen with Cisneros, it is crucial to add that meaning itself is not achieved by any given story—Rivera’s tales are not fables or allegories, and there are not always realizations for the reader—but the representation of a community attempting to understand their own lives is itself a meaningful act and the effect of much Chicano/ Latino short fiction. Another deeply influential author is Rudolfo A. Anaya, whose fiction has won numerous awards and much acclaim. In The Silence of the Llano (1982), Anaya takes as his subject the people of New Mexico and their lives in the rural areas of the state. Called a “Magical Realist,” Anaya skillfully interweaves local belief and custom into his narratives, creating works that are steeped in the spiritual experiences that comprise the everyday lives of Chicanos and Mexicanos of that area. Sabine Reyes Ulibarrí also a New Mexican, has published short-story collections in both Spanish and English. Tierra Amarilla: Cuentos de Nuevo Mexico (1964; Tierra Amarilla: Stories of New Mexico, 1971) and Mi abuela fumaba puros y otros cuentos de Tierra Amarilla/My Grandma Smoked Cigars, and Other Stories of Tierra Amarilla (1977) were published with parallel texts in English and Spanish. Like the works of Anaya, Ulibarrí’s stories are inspired by the landscape and people of New Mexico and draw upon local lore and oral tradition to portray the hispano communities there. Depicting a people who are deeply Catholic, Ulibarrí demonstrates the effect of lore on their lives, with stories such as “Mi caballo mago” about a magical stallion which recounts a version of La Llorona, the Mexican tale of the legendary weeping woman who still travels the earth crying for her drowned children. Though the authors mentioned above have received significant notice in journals and anthologies, there are still more Chicano writers whose work is less well known but also deeply tied to regional concerns, describing life on the border and in the barrios, respectively. Genaro González has published stories in a number of literary magazines. His collection Only Sons (1991) deals with living on the border in Texas and is concerned with the effect this political geography has on the people who inhabit this area. Nash Candelaria, Dagoberto Gilb, 839


and Alberto Ríos have all published stories both in journals and in collections and have received critical attention for their work. Max Martínez’s stories in The Adventures of the Chicano Kid, and Other Stories (1982) and A Red Bikini Dream (1990) depict the varied lives of Chicanos, from the poor of the barrio to upper-middle-class educated Chicanos, frequently with humor. Estela Portillo Trambley, from Texas, was the first Chicana to publish a book of short stories with Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings in 1975. Embodying feminist ideals of equality, women are the center of the narratives here, as Trambley decries the inequality and unjust treatment of women and celebrates their unique biology. In her fiction, Trambley proffers the belief that, because of the biological imperative of giving birth, women are by nature nurturing and sensitive to other beings. Common as they were in early 1970’s mainstream feminist writing, these ideas also proliferated in early Chicana writing. Just as antiessentialist feminist thought rebuffed the conundrum of biological essentialism, so too did early Chicana feminist fiction give way to a more sophisticated literary aesthetic, at once aware of the imperative to liberate Chicanas from the patriarchal representations of their bodies while able to represent the diversity among Chicanas’ lives. In the 1980’s and 1990’s there began a renaissance of fiction by Chicana/Latina women in the United States. This has been an important cultural intervention into what has been a largely male-dominated ethnic literary movement. Many of these authors have taken on disrupting stereotypical constructions of gender through ethnic identification, satirizing and criticizing the portrayals of women as either wife/mother or sexually promiscuous vamp and interwoven the issues of immigration, work, love, identity, and self-realization. Interest in the writing of women such as Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Roberta Fernández precipitated much of the explosion in Latina fiction. Probably the most popular and famous writer of this renaissance is Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street (1984) and Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories (1991). The 840


House on Mango Street is a series of forty-four vignettes centered on a single protagonist, reminiscent of Rivera’s . . . and the earth did not part. Considered a feminist Bildungsroman, Cisneros’s work has enjoyed a popularity unprecedented in Latino fiction and is now widely used in high school and college literature classes. It is the collection Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories, however, that solidifies Cisneros as a powerful writer of short fiction. The stories of this collection take place in Chicago (the city of Cisneros’s birth, and home to a both a large Mexican American and Puerto Rican community), Mexico, and the American Southwest. Exemplifying the best of personal and political consciousness, Cisneros draws heavily on Mexican and Mexican American history and lore in many of these stories, such as “Eyes of Zapata,” a tale told from the vantage point of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata’s lover. The Virgin of Guadalupe, a Mexican icon who functions as symbol of inspirational womanhood, figures in a number of stories with settings on both sides of the border. Writing almost entirely from a first-person point of view, Cisneros shows her mostly female protagonists struggling with their Latina identity and the constraints and strengths that those identities confer upon the characters. These characters are varied in their life experiences and roles. Some are mothers and wives; others are single females trying to find a place for themselves in a society which has presented them with few nontraditional options. Cisneros tackles issues as varied as spousal abuse (“Woman Hollering Creek”), acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (“Remember the Alamo”), and intracommunity racism (“Never Marry a Mexican”). The challenges that the protagonists take on—and that Cisneros takes on as a writer—exemplify the complexities of life as a Latina. Cisneros has been a pioneer in the representation of the linguistic hybridity of border-based Chicanos and all Latinos. In her fiction there is frequently a strong emphasis on the verbal, expressed through long passages of dialogue, much of which is rapid and lively, and through the extensive use of interior monologues. The verbal quality is enhanced by continual infusions of Spanglish and slang terms and almost constant cross841


pollination, evident even in the titles of the stories, such as “Bien Pretty” or “My Tocaya.” “The Marlboro Man” or “La Fabulosa,” for example, consist of conversations between unnamed friends who create, through their dialogue, modern myths about people of their community, creating a contemporary version of traditional orality and popular legend that characterizes speech and storytelling in Latino communities. Sandra Cisneros’s narrative is in fact, often polyvocal, with the voice of a single protagonist displaced in favor of a community of (at times conflicting) voices. In “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” recitations of prayers and miracles formulate multiple narratives within a single tale. In the story “Woman Hollering Creek” the narrative voice shifts several times from the singular to the plural, from the protagonist to community members—at times echoing the shift in locality, as characters cross from the Mexican side of the border to the U.S. side and back again. These narrative voices combine not so much to plot the story as to represent the impact the main event of the story— already passed—has had on a neighborhood. Though it is not always clear what has happened, Cisneros shows who it has happened to and so gives expression to an otherwise underrepresented community of border-dwellers. Writing in an accessible, lively style, Denise Chávez has authored the popular collection The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), a series of stories and vignettes narrated by a central character, Rocio Esquibel, who distributes menus to patients in a hospital. These highly verbal stories, along with those of Cisneros, are representative of some of the best of Latina fiction. The stories are arranged not chronologically but thematically, dealing with such issues as the search for strong female role models, the value of women’s work and daily tasks, and the role of memory, time, and communal and familial ties in the search for identity. Not coincidentally, the protagonist, Rocio, decides to become a writer and to chronicle the lives of friends and family in her community. Like several of the female protagonists of Cisneros’s stories, Rocio finds strength and autonomy through artistic expression. Like the work of Cisneros, Chávez’s work has received much positive criticism: Selections from The 842


Last of the Menu Girls have found their way into a number of anthologies of both Latino and mainstream American literature. Helena María Viramontes is another major Chicana author who grapples with issues of ethnic identity and infuses her stories with feminist sensibilities, as in her collection The Moths, and Other Stories (1985), her best-known work. The title story “The Moths” has been frequently anthologized in recent years, and the tragic story “The Cariboo Café” in particular has received considerable critical attention. In “The Cariboo Café” Viramontes narrates the experience of recent Mexican and Central American immigrants living in Los Angeles, weaving the lives of usually invisible characters into the fabric of the city as a whole. “The Cariboo Café,” parsed in separate, disjointed sections, follows a series of characters whose lives become tragically tangled. In the first section Sonya (about six years old) and her baby brother Macky are inadvertently locked out of their apartment, somewhere north of the Mexican border. The parents, illegal immigrants, are both at work and have warned the children to never venture far from the apartment, never trust the “polie” for they are la migra (immigration) officials in disguise, and never talk to strangers. Section 1 ends with the children lost, wandering in a warehouse district, and approaching a strange lady who seems to offer help. Section 2 introduces the owner and operator of the Cariboo Café, a man down on his luck, unable to afford to hire any help, not even a dishwasher. Coping poorly with the recent breakup of his family, the café owner finds himself increasingly the peer of the junkies, drunks, and homeless who loiter in his cafe. Among the other liminal figures who enter are a strange woman and two children, clearly not her own. Watching the nightly news, the café owner learns that the children have been reported missing, possibly kidnapped, but upholding his own rule to never talk to the “polie,” he declines to inform them of what he knows. In the final section, the putative kidnapper, a washerwoman by trade, narrates her own story in a hazy jumble of memory and motive. A native of Central America, the woman suffers the loss of her own child, probably a victim of the U.S.-sponsored Contra rebellion in the 1980’s. Still 843


suffering the trauma of loss, still in a haze of grief, the woman encounters the wandering Sonya and Macky and perceives the boy as her own lost son, attempting to bridge her trauma by taking him in. In her final and fatal confrontation with the police, she imagines she is back in Central America, fighting guerrilla forces. Though “The Cariboo Café” ends with a determinedly heroic act, other stories in the collection are more ambivalently rendered, as Viramontes avoids the easy political dichotomies and portrays the complexity of Latino life. Her main characters are mostly women, and a common theme in her fiction is the struggle for women to recognize the source and means of their oppression, both by the majority culture and the patriarchal strictures of Mexican American culture. Plots turn on transitional moments for the women, as they build bridges across generations to other women (“The Moths”) or come to recognize their loneliness (“The Neighbors”). A powerful theme in several stories is the Latina’s developing relationship with her own sexuality, fraught by her family’s prohibitions—for whom a woman’s sexuality is a source of honor to be guarded—or by religious sanction. The ending passage of the story “Birthday,” for example, narrates Alice’s terrible confusion as she prepares to have an abortion. Here, Viramontes’s prose style marks both the determined resolve of Alice’s decision (a painful coming into womanhood) and the internal battle she still wages with her cultural upbringing: Now the doctor will insert . . . the waves rock me into an anxious sleep. And i love. NO! I don’t love you, not you, God, knotted ball. I hate you, Alice. . . . Relax Alice, and try not to move again reaching up to the vastness. calm. i relax under the fluids that thicken like jelly. i am still; my body is transparent and light, and ounceless.

The oscillation between love and hate, faith and its rejection, occur simultaneously with the abortion, which is itself an ultimate action. Her decision renders her empty, or “ounceless,” but she endures nonetheless; “i am still.” 844


Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican American Writers For much of the Caribbean American community, concerns about space and place are every bit as important as they are for Chicano writers. With the movements to the mainland from Cuba and Puerto Rico, each wave of immigrants has created a new generation of writers. Pedro Juan Soto and José Luis González, two Puerto Rican writers, were part of the Generation of 1940, who wrote about life in New York at mid-century. Though he later returned to the island, Soto took as his subject the immigrant experience and barrio life. In Spiks (English translation, 1973), his collection of short stories published in 1956, Soto examined life on the streets. A heightened awareness of race, as indicated in the collection’s title—“spik” being a derogatory term for Puerto Ricans—affects his acute portrayal of the difficulty of life in New York for the Puerto Rican community. Spiks is also noteworthy for its realism, extensive use of street slang, and codeswitching—all fairly new techniques at the time. González, too, was one of the first writers to discuss the exile of Puerto Ricans in the United States and the racial tensions and economic difficulties of the community in numerous short stories. These writers and others of the 1940’s and 1950’s influenced subsequent Puerto Rican and other Latino writers of the Northeast. Just as the civil and cultural rights movements of the 1960’s influenced Chicano literature, so too did the heightened awareness of cultural roots and political struggle affect Puerto Ricans on the mainland. This awareness manifested itself in the literary production of the “Nuyoricans,” a term coined to describe the hybridity formed when island culture was imported to urban life. Early Nuyorican fiction prominently represented mostly male protagonists coming of age on the streets of New York. Consistently, the tension between life on the (AngloAmerican) mainland and the persistence of native language, ethics, and social mores gave rise to a new ethnic sensibility. No longer Puerto Rican only, the Nuyorican writer reconceptualized identity and social landscape, writing into existence not only a new ethnicity but also a new social construction of New 845


York City. While the difficulty of life in the United States and the racism of Anglo-American society were the focus of much fiction coming out of this period, it was accompanied by an idealized version of life on the island. A greater embrace of cultural difference began, a difference expressed in the writing through the extensive use of Spanish, frequent code-switching, and insertion of customs, practices, and terminologies particular to Puerto Ricans. One such writer is Piri Thomas, whose autobiography Down These Mean Streets (1967) became widely popular; the tensions that arose for him, being a dark-skinned Puerto Rican in America, familiar with the ways of the streets, reveal themselves in his fiction and memoir alike. Yet his collection of short fiction, Stories from El Barrio (1978), does not dwell entirely upon the negative aspects of life in the barrio but affirms values such as male friendship and personal strength. Ed Vega (Edgardo Vega Yunqué), too, writes short stories that have their setting in the barrio. Mendoza’s Dreams (1987) is a collection of stories linked through a narrator named Alberto Mendoza. Rather than a chronicle of difficulty and urban strife, Vega infuses these stories with humor. In this earlier work his characters are not suffering migrants but complexly rendered individuals who encounter success in unlikely but very American ways. His Casualty Report (1991), however, departs from the earlier works and focuses on the destruction wrought by violence and drugs in the Puerto Rican barrios. Probably the most prolific Puerto Rican writer, Nicholasa Mohr, too, has been obsessed with the struggle of life between two cultures. Much of her writing has been for a young adult audience, including her El Bronx Remembered (1975), a novella with short stories, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. In this collection the stories span the years between 1946 and 1956, taking New York as the backdrop for Puerto Rican youth for whom the island life is distant but far from removed. Her Rituals of Survival: A Woman’s Portfolio (1985) was her first work for adults, and in 1997 she published A Matter of Pride, and Other Stories. Both these collections center on Puerto Rican women in New York struggling to cope with Latino machismo and break 846


out of the barrio, and they highlight the poignancy of returning to the neighborhood of one’s birth. Traditions and beliefs from the Caribbean still persist in these neighborhoods, despite the frequently hostile influence of “American” New York, a theme Mohr carries through all her works. In the story “Aunt Rosana’s Rocker,” for example, the female protagonist, Zoraida, is thought to be possessed, and a spiritualist is consulted and rituals performed to exorcize the invasive spirit. Like Mohr, Judith Ortiz Cofer, in An Island Like You (1995), writes of young, contemporary protagonists who are Puerto Rican immigrants negotiating the space between the two cultures. As in the work of her fellow Puerto Rican writers, the language and cultural particulars of the community figure here. Considered the most mainstream of Puerto Rican writers, Cofer markets both her poetry and young adult works to a wide audience and makes her work accessible and friendly. In 1992, the writer Abraham Rodriguez, Jr., published The Boy Without a Flag. These seven short stories center on Puerto Rican Americans—mainly adolescents—in the south Bronx and reflections of the alienation, rebellion, and submission experienced by that group in the United States. The title story is emblematic of the cultural collisions and confusion sometimes encountered when straddling a bifurcated identity. “The Boy Without a Flag” tells of a boy who refuses to salute the American flag in school, after being told by his father that the United States is the enemy of the Puerto Rican people. The boy is sent to the principal, and his father is called in. Instead of denouncing the United States to the principal, as the boy expects, the father apologizes to the principal. The scene of capitulation is nearly archetypal in immigrant and ethnic fiction, and the collection received positive critical attention. Cuban exiles and Cuban Americans form another vibrant sector of Latino short fiction. Roberto Fernández, who came to the United States at eleven years of age, has written short-story collections in Spanish: Cantos sin rumbos (1975; directionless tales) and El jardin de la luna (1976; the garden of the moon). In the stories, Fernández writes humorously about the Cuban community in the United States and life in exile. Virgil Suárez, a Cu847


ban American, writes about Cubans and their families who have left their island for life in the United States in Welcome to the Oasis, and Other Stories (1992). Junot Díaz, a Dominican American writer, seems poised to move Latino short fiction into the sights of mainstream readers and garner wide attention for his work and the work of other Latinos. Díaz has published stories in The New Yorker, Story, and The Best American Short Stories 1996, as well as mainstream magazines. In 1996 Díaz published a collection of his stories titled Drown, which was widely praised and quickly became a bestseller. With stories that take place in both the Dominican Republic and the northeastern United States, Díaz takes his place in the tradition of Caribbean writers who tell of the contrast between island and mainland life and all its attendant struggles. Like other Latino writers before him, Díaz employs extensive dialogue, slang, anglicizations of English, and code-switching— yet manages a remarkably restrained style and lyricism that have won him much acclaim. Drown has been translated into Spanish as well, thereby widening his reading community and offering a literary link between mainland and Caribbean readers. Díaz is indicative of a trend. Latino fiction in the United States continues to explode, both in terms of volume and sales and in terms of the numbers of upcoming young authors. Michele Serros’s How to Be a Chicana Role Model (2000) received positive notices. Danny Romero, Veronica González, and Sergio Troncoso are but a few of today’s major authors in Latino short fiction. There is increasing interest, too, in tracing the literary history of Latinos and creating a body of critical work to address the many issues embedded in the fiction. As Latino short fiction gains prominence, it also gains gravity, drawing the attention of mainstream readers and presses. Indeed, it may be said that, as Latino fiction has shaped the landscape of Latino culture at large, it has helped reconstruct (along with other ethnic literatures) the broader American culture, thereby fully claiming a place in the American literary canon. — Adrienne Pilon and Dean Franco

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Learn More Augenbraum, Harold, and Margarite Fernández Olmos, eds. The Latino Reader: An American Literary Tradition from 1542 to the Present. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. This collection provides historical background on writers and their sociopolitical context while featuring their works. A list of additional readings presents criticism and history for research on all periods. Calderón, Hectór, and José David Saldívar, eds. Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture and Ideology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. This collection brings together some of the most compelling and important criticism on Chicano literature today by major Chicano scholars from around the country. Cortina, Rodolfo, ed. Hispanic American Literature: An Anthology. Chicago: NTC, 1998. A comprehensive collection of Hispanic and Latino prose and poetry spanning from the sixteenth century to the present. Luis, William. Dance Between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature Written in the United States. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997. An historical overview of Puerto Rican, Dominican and Cuban literature in the United States along with critical essays. Milligan, Bryce, Mary Guerrero Milligan, and Angela de Hoyos, eds. Daughters of the Fifth Sun. New York: Putnam, 1995. A feminist introduction starts off this collection of contemporary Latina short fiction and poetry. Santiago, Roberto, ed. Boricuas: Influential Puerto Rican Writings—An Anthology. New York: Ballantine, 1995. A good general reference on the subject, this text is comprehensive in its inclusion of a variety of genres. Stavans, Ilan, ed. New World: Young Latino Writers. New York: Delta, 1997. Stavans has compiled twenty-three stories by some of the youngest and most exciting Latino writers working today. Suárez, Virgil, and Delia Poey, eds. Iguana Dreams: New Latino Fiction. New York: Harper, 1992. The first anthology of contemporary Latino fiction, featuring twenty-nine different writers. 849

Latin American Short Fiction

A

s common and somewhat acceptable as the term “Latin American literature” is as a functional label for literature produced in the “Latin” countries of the Americas, most anthologists and scholars tend to take time to apologize for its usage or, at least, to justify its usage in the face of some opposition. The basic contention is valid: Latin America is not a distinctive geographical or geopolitical space. Nor is it a culturally homogenous space. The term is a convenience, but it is a convenience that is rooted in some basic facts of history. For the purposes of this survey, the term encompasses those countries in the “New World” formerly colonized by Portugal, Spain, and Italy. Included, therefore, are the countries that are located on the South American continent and those countries in the area that is now called Central America. Those islands in the Caribbean that share a history of colonization with the South American continent are also included. The functional languages of Latin American literature are Spanish and Portuguese. Spanish dominates. Without Brazil and its formidable tradition of literature, Latin America would be exclusively a Spanish domain. Very little exists in Latin America that pertains to Italy, even though Italians have had a significant presence in countries like Argentina and Bolivia, but then so have the English. English remains a distinct foil to the march of Latin American literature and culture. The history of Latin America is a history which could have paralleled the history of North America and its increasingly homogenized single-nation identity. Like the American North, the South has had a strong imaginative sense of its unity. This imaginative identity dominated much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries largely because of the liberation efforts of individuals like Simón Bolívar. Bolívar imagined and wrote about a Latin American state that would share much of the sense of nationalism that would come to define the North. There is a rea850


son for this development. As with the British empire, the Spanish empire was quite clearly understood to be an extension of the Spanish nation-state. Brazil remained a peculiar and massive interruption of the dominance of Spanish culture in the Americas. That dominance extended well into the North American continent until a century ago and has slowly begun to crawl its way back into that continent now through immigration and a redefining of cultural and racial demographics. The Spanish colonial government understood its empire as a single force and a single protectorate and thus sought to conceive of a culture that was distinctive and somewhat homogeneous. The variations emerged through the peculiar dialogues and clashes that took place between these Spanish societies and the native communities that existed in the regions before the arrival of the Spanish. The Inca in eastern South America, the Aztec in Central America, and the Maya in the rain forests of northeastern South America were large and dominant cultures before the arrival of the Spanish. Spanish colonialism forced these cultures to struggle for survival, but in their struggle they had a lasting effect on the culture of the region—the understanding of landscape and the shaping of the imagination. Latin American literature and, in many ways, Latin American short fiction emerge out of the strange contradictions between nationalism and empire that characterize the experience of the region. The movement toward independence in Latin America, as in all other formerly colonized states, entailed a cultural quest for a distinctive cultural and national identity. This identity would be found in the history and native presence of these nations and in the agendas for self-actualization that would emerge during the period leading toward independence and the demise of the Spanish empire’s rule. Latin American identity is peculiarly defined by the tension between the colonial force of Spanish dominance, the spirit of discovery and the quest to found a new society with new values and a new understanding of landscape and individuality, and the presence of non-European cultures in the region. In Brazil, this pattern is very much a part of what has given a distinction to its cultural identity and to its literature. Brazil’s distinction lies in the dia851


logue that the society has had with its racial complexity, particularly the presence of African slaves and freed people, especially from Nigeria, in the region. The religious and narrative experiences have given rise to a distinctive literary sensibility, which remains one of the more remarkable and fresh in the modern world. Most scholars recognize in Latin American culture and literary practice the importance of history and the way that history has come to shape the way people see themselves. The question is, do Argentines see themselves as quite distinct from Colombians? Do Mexicans feel any affinity with Cubans? Do Peruvians believe that one can read their literature with the same lens that would be used to read Brazilian literature? Nationalism has made it possible to recognize very peculiar and specific trends in Latin American writing that are specific to different regions and countries. The history of modern Latin American writing, like the history of Caribbean writing or African writing, has been one of balancing the pressures of the publishing industry, which has a tendency to homogenize and lump all countries into a single, manageable unit, and the desire for a distinctive nationalism that would recognize that the histories of these various countries, while intersecting at certain points, remain quite distinct. This survey presents more similarities and patterns of Latin American literature than differences. It acknowledges also that the writers being discussed are themselves related to one another as part of a fraternity (or sorority) of like-minded artists working in a distinctive milieu. During the middle of the nineteenth century, a large contingent of Latin American writers found one another while studying in Paris. At the Parisian cafés, the talk was of politics, revolution, and the unification of Latin America. They found that they shared a language and a history of trying to break the shackles of the culture that undergirded their language. In Paris, they knew they were not Spanish or European writers—not in any useful political or cultural sense. They knew they were shaping a literature that was going to be uniquely birthed from the bloodied soil of Latin America. The shaping of a Latin American literary sensibility would 852


grow out of the fact of language. Language helps to shape audience, and audience leads to the natural assumption of a literature—a national literature. The audience in this sense is an English-speaking audience that does presume the Latin American culture as a collective other. They share a language and, in time, have come to share certain distinctive traits in literary practice. The 1960’s brought with it the work of Alejo Carpentier in Cuba, Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia, Jorge Luis Borges in Bolivia, and Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru and what has been termed “Magical Realism” or “marvelous realism.” This sometimes uncertainly and variously defined literary style came to shape much of the literature produced in the larger world in the last thirty years of the twentieth century. It is a remarkable phenomenon, but those who have been drawn to it have understood it in rather homogenized terms. There have been other trends, even if less influential, over the years. There was a period of Latin American writing in the 1930’s when realist novelists, influenced by the Russian masters, were producing works of naturalism and political commitment. Brazilian writers wrote about the horrors of life on sugar plantations, and those in the Spanishspeaking countries wrote of peasant life in the rural areas of these nations. These styles appeared in the many periodicals that would come to publish the work of the most important Latin American writers over the centuries. In the late 1800’s, Edgar Allan Poe supplied many Latin American writers with the grotesque sensibility that some have argued was the precursor of the magical side of Magical Realism. Latin writers encountered Poe’s work while living in Paris. These writers were reading and translating the work of English and French writers and were bringing those sensibilities to bear on their own work. These patterns emerged in somewhat collective ways. Communication through periodicals, conferences, exile, and cross-country travel led to a situation in which these writers, while acknowledging their nationalist distinctions, also understood themselves to be part of a larger movement in literature. Philosophies therefore abound regarding the character of the Latin American aesthetic. The short story remains one of the 853


most important forms of literary practice in Latin American literature because it has, whether by design or the accident of its length, been the laboratory of Latin American fictional writing. Any attempt to study the short story’s peculiar history in Latin America amounts to a remarkable entry into the evolution of Latin American writing. It would seem that a short story does, by its very nature, make certain aesthetic demands that have come to be accepted values or traits of the form. When does a short story become a novella, and when does a long short story become a novel? It is normally argued that the short story’s popularity in Latin America emerges from the fact that the publishing industry there has been notoriously limited. The heart of fiction writing in the region has not been the novel-making of publishing houses (as has been the case in Britain and America, for instance) but has rested instead in the powerful and innovative works of periodicals and journals. These venues, the nature of their size, favored the short story. Others have argued that the short story is peculiarly popular and famous in Latin America because the aesthetics of the short story are closely tied to the narrative tradition of folklore and the oral tradition that have shaped the region over the years. Such scholars have linked the modern Latin American short story to the folktales of the Inca, Maya, Taino, and Aztec peoples; the oral epics of the Yoruba; and the detailed accounts of discovery and proselytizing that were written by conquerors and monks alike during the age of expansion. The idea is a compelling one but one that does not always explain some of the heavily Westernized qualities of the Latin American text. Others hold to the view that the short story developed well in Latin America because a few successful and sometimes exclusive short-story geniuses in the region (like Borges) made writing short stories a distinct cultural phenomenon. It forced all writers to take the perfection of the form seriously and to be venturesome in promoting it. Regardless of the reason, the short story is a major force in Latin American writing. The short story is one way in which the literary developments of the region have been defined. There are hundreds of “groundbreaking” anthologies of the Latin American short story in 854


translation emerging in the English-speaking parts of the world. These anthologies have also become one of the important vehicles by which the works of Latin American female writers are reaching the rest of the world. The short-story anthology is a convenient vehicle because it allows for the inclusion of many writers in a single volume and it serves as a splendid primer for university courses on Latin American writing. This survey will examine some of the highlights of the development of Latin American writing and will draw attention to both the collective and shared sensibilities of the Latin American short story and the important nationalistic differences. It is more helpful, however, to examine these developments through the work of some of the most important writers of short fiction in the region. The Colonial Period Ascribing literary precedence to the colonial period in Latin American history is something that has been done increasingly by contemporary writers who have turned to the writings of that period for a tradition. They have, in effect, turned to the historical and bureaucratic documents of a massive and complex empire that established, in the middle of the sixteenth century, two major viceroyalties in Lima, Peru, and in Mexico City. These complex communities were shaped by the acts of the conquistadors, who marched through the continent transforming what had once been an empire of islands into a vast empire of lands and peoples, which stretched throughout the Americas, as far north as Texas and as far east as the Philippines. At first the island of Hispanola was the heart of the Spanish empire, but once Hernán Cortés had ransacked Mexico and had been followed first by an equally formidable army of monks and priests and later by a remarkably organized battalion of lawyers and bureaucrats, the Spanish empire was in full swing in the Americas. For nearly two hundred years, the Spanish were the dominant force in the region. Havana remained an important Spanish American center and trade city, while Lima and Mexico City evolved as cultural hubs that in many ways challenged the ascendancy of Castile and Madrid. In these New World cities, there 855


was a thriving artistic and literary community. The work produced by this community, however, was notably imitative of the work of the Golden Age in Spanish letters, and it produced a poet who is still recognized as one of the last of the great Golden Age poets, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Modern Latin American writers have found greater affinity and relevance not in the literary output of the early colonials but in the historical documents of the great figures of that period. Spain’s government bureaucracies were, if nothing else, fascinated by the act of recording. Files upon files remain that detail the strange and vicious process of colonialization and the terrible anxiety and guilt that surrounded many of the actions of the colonizers in the region. The narratives of historians, governors, priests, and leaders of the evolving empire remain some of the most fascinating accounts of an emerging culture, an emerging identity that can now be regarded as distinctly Latin American. Christopher Columbus himself began a trend in writing about the Indies that regards the apprehension of the new space as an act of “discovering” the other or coming to grips with the other. This otherness would come to influence the works of such Western artists as William Shakespeare, who in his play The Tempest (pr. 1611) echoed the fantastical narratives of the colonizing world in his construction of a play. The play is as much rooted in magic and the supernatural as it is in the celebration of colonial authority and the patriarchy of the colonialist agenda. Columbus told his tale and sought to reconstruct his tales of mystery and discovery. These tales, positioning the colonial space as a world of impossible and different happenings, can easily be seen as one of the important precursors to the Latin American text. The political agenda of Columbus remained relevant to many who would follow him: a strong need to convince the rest of the world that a new space, a new sensibility, and a new world of powerful images and wealth had been found. It is not hard to see in much of the way that Latin American literature is apprehended today something of this quest. It is also not hard to see the inclination toward the magical as part of the larger project 856


to create a sense of otherness, a sense of cultural removal in the work of contemporary writers. Some of the important writers of histories and other fascinating narratives include seeming admonitions to pure and chaste life in bawdy stories that barely mask the relish that writers like Juan Rodríguez Freyle took in outlining some of the lewd acts of sinners. These writers remain the singular conduit by which the history of the Inca, Taino, Maya, and Aztec people of that continent have passed to the modern reader. Looming above all others is Bartolomé de Las Casas, who can be credited in many ways with defining the racial shape of the region in his many efforts to tackle the troubling question of the fate of the native peoples of the region. Las Casas’s writings are peppered with detailed emblematic accounts of atrocities against native peoples. His efforts were to convince the Spanish crown of the need to treat the native peoples as humans, as worthy of the efforts of evangelism by the Catholic Church. Along with him were writers like Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Francisco López de Gómara, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo. There is no way to describe the works of these writers as short stories or even fictional narratives, but contemporary writers have shown again and again that there are, buried in these narratives, a series of shorter exemplary stories that have led to a tradition of aesthetics and narrative consistency in the work of the writers who came after them. The themes with which these writers grappled, the politics that shaped their existence, and the terrible conditions they witnessed, even as they enjoyed the excitement of establishing a whole new world, are elements that have come to shape the character of Latin American fiction in the last several hundred years. It would therefore be a mistake to presume that the Latin American short story began in the nineteenth century. Indeed the Latin American tale, understood as emerging out of a larger tradition that was attempting to give names to a new space, began much earlier as part of the conflicted truth of the colonial agenda itself. Modern writers remain inscribed in the truth of this history and have, for years, been involved in restoring to the Latin American imagination the fact of these 857


histories. In other words, it is impossible to read Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, or Alejo Carpentier without reference to the writings of those figures of Latin American history listed above. There exist several native narratives collected by priests and government officials that now form a part of the larger fabric of the Latin American text. No one can claim purity in these narratives, which were collected by colonizers and used for their own agendas, but many of these stories have somehow tallied with the oral narratives that have been passed down from generation to generation in the remote parts of Latin America. Nationalism and the Emergence of the Short Story The nineteenth century saw the continent-wide press toward nationalism. In many ways this pattern would not take root in Brazil in the same way because Brazil’s position as the seat of the Portuguese empire was largely unassailable from the onset. In fact, much of the literature that has emerged in Brazil, while being rooted in the landscape and culture of the region, has so shaped and defined Portuguese letters that there is far less of a sense of inferiority and acquiescence to the metropolis or the mother country than has occurred in the literatures from the former English colonies and the Spanish colonial countries. The emergence of nationalism in the nineteenth century, however, played a major part in the shaping of a literary aesthetic. This aesthetic, influenced by the push for nationalism in such places as the United States, Haiti, and the march for revolution in France, generated, at first, works that sought to locate a literary tradition in the region. This attempt was not unlike the nineteenth century preoccupation with origins that characterized literary practice in Europe. In England, there was the championing of the Anglo-Saxon mythic narrative Beowulf (c. 1000), while in Germany numerous renderings of Nibelungenlied (c. 1200; The Nibelungenlied, 1848) served as foundation blocks for a nationalist aesthetic. In Chile, Diego Barros Arana produced a seminal edition of the epic poem by Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Purén indómito (1862), which would compete with the Argentine Juan María Gutiérrez’s 1848 edition of Pedro 858


de Oña’s epic Arauco domado (Arauco Tamed, 1948), which appeared in 1596. It was also during this period that the first distinctive collections of short stories began to appear in Latin America. While some critics remain adamant that the cuadros de costumbres were in fact not quite short stories but narratives, which functioned as anecdotal tales with little of the structural unities normally associated with the short story as it emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century. These narratives undeniably influenced the short-story movement that assumed full force at the beginning of the twentieth century. The earlier part of the nineteenth century saw many examples of the long narrative. The novel was thriving, influenced largely by the massive efforts of writers like Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and other writers from outside the Latin American tradition. Significant epic novels would emerge as part of the articulation of nationalism. Postcolonial critic Homi Bhaba asserted that the novel is inextricably linked to the notion of nationalism. His belief was borne out in the literature produced in the early part of the century. Indeed this idea is the foundation of the work by Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1991), which argues convincingly that the shaping of the nationalism of the region was tied to the fiction generated during that time. The cuadros de costumbres emerged out of a nineteenth century Latin American preoccupation with looking closely at the realities of the continent and the various societies that were emerging out of the colonial backdrop. Politics, sociological conditions, and a fascination with the flora and fauna of the region led to works that offered vignettes and narratives depicting the life of natives, Africans, and other peasant classes. The term cuadros de costumbres was coined in Colombia, where writers would submit these somewhat static and detailed accounts of Latin American culture to a select group of periodicals devoted to such narratives. El Mosaico (1858-1872) published the works of such writers as José Caicedo Rojas, Juan de Dios Restrepo, and José María Vergara y Vergara. The fascination with bizarre 859


details and the focus on local experience would come to shape the work of writers that would follow them. Most important, however, they established in the imagination of Latin American readers and writers a language that was located in the region and that was involved with the casting of a reality that was distinctive and self-reflexive. The true emergence of the modern short story—a genre in its own right—would not take place in Latin American letters until the latter half of the nineteenth century. At that time, the shared sense of a Latin American identity was taking shape. Periodicals throughout the region were publishing the writing of authors from all across the continent, and there was a growing sense that a distinctive sensibility was emerging. The next one hundred and thirty years would see the emergence of some of the most important and gifted writers of the twentieth century. These writers evolved a nationalist agenda in their work—an agenda that would secure the nationalist identities of the various nations. They shaped an aesthetic that could be theorized as Latin American—an aesthetic emerging from a shared history, a shared political evolution, and a shared sense of literary antecedent. Authors of what can be best termed cuadros de costumbres, such as Argentina’s Esteban Echeverría, paved the way for writers such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who has been described by Roberto González Echevarría as “one of the most prominent figures in nineteenth century Latin American literature, politics, social thought and education” largely on the strength of his sometimes-infamous Civilización y barbarie: Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga, y aspecto fisico, costumbres, y hábitos de la República Argentina (commonly known as Facundo; 1845; Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants: Or, Civilization and Barbarism, 1868), and the early feminist Juana Manuela Gorriti. Other notable nineteenth century authors include Ricardo Palma of Peru, and a writer who is quite decidedly one of the greatest writers of the last two hundred years, the mulatto Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis of Brazil. Machado published nine novels and more than two hundred short stories in his lifetime. 860


The Modern Short Story There are several ways to talk about the Latin American short story. Some scholars have, in an attempt to underplay the regional distinctions of the genre, focused on a select number of stellar writers who have formed an impressive pantheon of Latin American giants stretching across the “cone” of South America and into the islands of the Caribbean archipelago. These writers all helped to shape a Latin American aesthetic that would give rise to even more cosmopolitan writers of the contemporary period. While movements are acknowledged, they are not defined by nationality but by literary trends and concerns. Others have sought more regional and nationalistic readings of the literature of the region. The distinctions that separate the Brazilian and Cuban literary traditions from those of the larger nation-states on the mainland of South America, for instance, are often cited as the basis for this approach. A number of shortstory anthologies argue the case for a well-defined tradition by nationality, which must be identified, understood, and appreciated for any genuine understanding of the work of the region. These two approaches to the Latin American short story, however, cannot be seen as exclusive. Indeed, what is worth noting here is that the Latin American short story, like all of Latin American letters has, in the last century, been forced to define its relevance and strength in a milieu that lends itself to easy generalizations and the regionalism of the publishing world. In other words, for the last hundred years, Latin American literature has been perceived as a “new thing,” a fantastic and unknown thing to be discovered. While literature from the region has never been obscure and inaccessible, it has been distant enough to make the discovery of a new voice an occasion for the celebration of otherness. Many of the major writers of the region have, at some point in their careers, lived in extended exile from their home countries either in Latin American or Europe. This fact encourages a survey of the literature of the region through examination of the writers who have come to have an impact on the international stage. There are a number of indisputable giants of Latin American writing, figures who have been seen as representa861


tives of the region and who have unquestionably influenced writers in the twentieth century. These stalwart figures have shaped the way in which the short story has been written in Latin America and around the world. They are influential writers, major figures of the century, and writers who should be studied carefully by anyone interested in examining Latin American literature. These writers, tellingly, have developed international reputations, but their lasting legacy is “local”—it rests in their success at establishing a tradition in Latin American writing. Of this group of writers, Rubén Darío of Nicaragua is the least likely to be considered a master of the short story. He was better known as a poet. Darío is arguably the most important Spanish poet in centuries. His fresh modernism was, at its core, a rejection of the old literary traditions of Spain and an embrace of anything outside that sensibility. In a jazzlike openness to all other forms, Darío, on the strength of his first major success, Azul (1888), saw develop around him a movement that would be called Modernismo—a movement which would change the direction of Latin American writing. Dario’s contributions were largely in poetry but he also wrote a series of very short, poetic narratives, which would influence the works of numerous short-story writers to come. If Darío was a central influence, the person who would take Darío’s ideas and transform them into the short-story genre, bringing to the form a perfection rarely surpassed since, was Horacio Quiroga, often labeled the father of the Latin American short story. His dispassionate rendering of narratives set in the jungles of Uruguay and his exploration of themes of violence and human abjection shaped an aesthetic which would come to be called Borges-like in the latter part of the twentieth century. Jorge Luis Borges, along with Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar, admitted an indebtedness to this writer of sublime tragedies. During the early twentieth century, several important fiction writers emerged, many of them specializing in the short story. Their importance as writers rested largely on their international reputations. These writers included the Argentine Ricardo Güi862


raldes, author of Cuentos de muerte y de sangre (1915); Rómulo Gallegos of Venezuela, who, apart from writing one of the most important and definitive novels of Latin American letters, Doña Bárbara (1929; English translation, 1984), also published several short stories in the realist vein; and Luisa Mercedes Levinson, an Argentine who lived much of her life outside Argentina and who produced a small but significant body of stories and novels, which are notable for their striking comingling of the erotic and the violent. It would be Jorge Luis Borges, however, her blind countryman and one of the first writers to declare exclusive loyalty to the short story (having found the novel to be far too long and flawed in its very essence), who has come to define the Latin American short story. Borges, in many ways, seems an unlikely spokesperson for a nationalist literary tradition since very little of his work is set in Latin America. Indeed, Borges was notorious for locating his narratives outside the region. Furthermore, Borges spent much of his writing life living outside Latin America. His literary style, rather than adhering to the stereotype established by other writers who focused so fully and passionately on the landscape and culture of the region, turned toward a more ironic and dispassionate tone. His devotion to German and English writers, whom he read in their original languages, is unquestionable, but he opened the Latin American text, allowing it to become more international in its vision. Borges also forced the artists of the region to seriously examine what an aesthetic truly is. Is an aesthetic defined by subject matter, by the use of local fauna and flora, or is an aesthetic related to literary style, having its shape and structure defined by a coherent and traceable tradition? Borges’s narratives introduced certain critical features to the Latin American text. His Ficciones, 1935-1944 (1944; English translation, 1962) can be called only seminal; it established his penchant for the use of fictionalized historical details, his fascination with the idea of the short story as a metaphysical essay—a polemical construct which never loses sight of the need for drama, tension, and conflict. Sentimentality was eschewed at all costs by Borges, and his work sought to stretch the narrative possibilities of the genre. 863


If Borges introduced the practice of irony and a dispassionate sensibility to the Latin American oeuvre, his Cuban contemporary Alejo Carpentier introduced a devotion to history that remains unchallenged. Carpentier’s fiction is always fascinated by time, is always rooted in a strong sense of historical space, and always adheres to the notion that Latin American culture is shaped by a distinctive history that can be excavated for narrative possibilities. His ability to bring together a strong sense of history and a fascination with the magic of human experience and narrative is one of the reasons he is sometimes regarded as the first genuine practitioner of the Magical Realist approach to fiction. In his short-story collection Guerra del tiempo (1958; War of Time, 1970), Carpentier explores various narrative modes and thematic complexities, which have been extremely influential in modern Latin American fiction. Miguel Ángel Asturias, the Guatemalan winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, may have been pivotal in alerting the Latin American literary world to the rich possibilities located in the native languages and cultures of the region. His short fictions, for years, seemed devoted to exploring the folk traditions of the Mayan tradition to which he belonged. Much of his early work involved the translation of these Mayan narratives into Spanish and the use of these tales to shape his novels and short stories. The incredible, mythic quality of these stories would serve as ample fodder for the “magical” side of the Magical Realist construct in Latin American writing. The 1960’s saw a seemingly sudden explosion of Latin American writing on the world stage and, in the process, led to the emergence of several figures who are now considered to be the stalwart figures of the modern Latin American short story. In 1960, Julio Cortázar published Rayuela (1963; Hopscotch, 1966) and in the process ushered in the careers of Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Cortázar’s shortstory collections, which include the formidable Bestiario (1951) and the well-known Todos los fuegos el fuego (1966; All Fires the Fire, and Other Stories, 1973), reflect his fascination with the extraordinary and the bizarre, a surrealist sensibility he honed while living in Paris. 864


Carlos Fuentes, a Mexican with a most cosmopolitan background, has published some of the more important novels in Latin American letters. Like Carpentier in Cuba, Fuentes embarked on a journey to reconcile Mexico’s violent and dichotomous past through sometimes conflicted but always probing narrative fiction. Fuentes’s interest has always been to demonstrate that it is impossible to understand the Latin American sensibility without understanding both the native (in his case, the Aztec) and the colonial (Spanish) past and how these two pasts have intersected, clashed, and merged. Gabriel García Márquez sets most of his narratives in his native Colombia. His fiction is fluent and remarkable for its capacity to balance his commitment to the exploration of political ideas and the study of human nature and human action. He remains, along with Borges, one of the best-known writers from Latin America, and he has always been a champion of writing from that region. While his output has been primarily in the form of the novel, he has published a number of remarkable short stories including the much-anthologized “A Very Old Man with Wings” and “Balthazar’s Marvelous Afternoon,” which reveal his interest in the surreal and supernatural and the uncannily deft way he excavates the foibles of the human condition. By locating the bulk of his narratives in his own region and by borrowing from such American writers as William Faulkner, García Márquez has effectively established one of the critical characteristics of the modern Latin American writer: an international bent that remains rooted in an understanding of the local. It is a balance that is not always achieved but one that many writers seek to accomplish. Mario Vargas Llosa, like Márquez, has not published as widely as others in the area of the short story; however, like Márquez, Vargas Llosa has brought fame and some popularity to the Latin American literary world through the publication of several very important novels. Vargas Llosa, who was born in Peru, and who honed his craft in the region, published one collection of short stories, Los jefes (1959; The Cubs, and Other Stories, 1979), which reflects some of the themes that would mark his work. Vargas Llosa’s narratives are consistently preoccupied with guilt and re865


gret—guilt shaped by the arrival of maturity and the capacity of an individual to view his or her sordid past with the hindsight of enlightenment. The horrors and failures of the past lead to intense guilt such that the narratives themselves tend to be extended acts of penance and expiation. It should not be lost on readers that this attempt to reconcile a past full of secrets and errors is quite emblematic of the Latin American text. Beyond this grouping of important figures there are numerous other Latin American writers who have contributed significantly to the shaping of the Latin American short story. Each year new anthologies appear with translations of a “new wave” of narratives from Latin America. A significant development has been the appearance of many specialist anthologies, which have focused on the sometimes-ignored work of women writers from the region. These anthologies demonstrate that Latin American women have been writing stories for at least two centuries, and their work has proved as equally compelling and fascinating as the work of their male counterparts. At the same time, anthologies that focus on the work from specific countries continue to appear. Most of these anthologies attempt to justify the act of speaking about a national literature, but for the most part the act of collecting work from a given country is prompted by the pragmatics of publishing and the logistical nightmare that could come from other, more regional, anthologies. Increasingly, the Latin American short story is expanding to include works by writers who were born and reared in the United States, some of whom are writing in English and others in Spanish. If nothing else, such developments show that Latin American writing is introducing more and more complex ways to view itself and is becoming a significant force in the evolution of the short-story genre. With the growth of a Latino population in North America, mass interest in Latin American authors has led to the emergence of many writers who have developed an international standing. These writers form the core of a new generation that has carried the Latin American short story into the twenty-first century. — Kwame Dawes 866


Learn More Arnold, A. James, Julio Rodríguez-Luis, and J. Michael Dash, eds. A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1994. A historical and critical look at literature from the Caribbean. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Balderston, Daniel, ed. The Latin American Short Story: An Annotated Guide to Anthologies and Criticism. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Organizes the enormous body of shortstory anthologies from the nineteen countries of Spanish America and Brazil for systematic study. The main section comprises annotated listings of 1,302 short-story anthologies. A second section comprises annotated bibliographies of criticism of the short story. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Bloom, Harold, ed. Caribbean Women Writers. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1997. A thorough examination of contemporary, female Caribbean writers of English, including Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Beryl Gilroy, and Edwidge Danticat. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Brown, Stewart, ed. Caribbean New Wave: Contemporary Short Stories. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1990. This anthology collection covers Caribbean short stories written in English and discusses Caribbean social life and customs. Echevarría, Roberto González, and Enrique Pupo-Walker, eds. The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. 3 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Volume 1 covers the period from discovery to modernism, volume 2 covers the twentieth century, and volume 3 covers Brazilian literature. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Erro-Peralta, Nora, and Caridad Silva-Núñez, eds. Beyond the Border: A New Age in Latin American Women’s Fiction. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Cleis Press, 1991. Covers works by Latin American female writers. Includes bibliographical references. Foster, David William, ed. Handbook of Latin American Literature. 2d ed. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992. Offers separate essays on all Latin American countries, including French and Creole Haiti and Portuguese Brazil, written by scholars who 867


focus on dominant issues and major movements, figures, and works, with emphasis on sociocultural and interpretive assessments. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Markham, E. A., ed. The Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Covers Caribbean social life and customs and examines selected short stories. Includes bibliographical references. Moss, Joyce, and Lorraine Valestuk. Latin American Literature and Its Times: Profiles of Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events That Influenced Them. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. The fifty works included in this volume span a variety of genres and countries (including the United States) as well as historical periods. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Partnoy, Alicia, ed. You Can’t Drown the Fire: Latin American Women Writing in Exile. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Cleis Press, 1988. Covers twentieth century female writers whose works have been translated into English. Includes bibliographical references. Smith, Verity, ed. Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997. Contains entries on writers, works, and topics relating to the literature of Latin America, including survey articles on all the continent’s individual countries. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Wickham, John, and Stewart Brown, eds. The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. A pan-Caribbean collection, ranging beyond the Anglophone territories to include stories originally published in Spanish, French, and Dutch. Includes bibliographical references.

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Appendices

More Latino Writers The following list of 401 additional Latino writers is arranged by region: Caribbean, Central America, North America, and South America. Within regions, names appear by ethnicity or nationality, then alphabetically by surname. Each author is identified by the genre or discipline (essayist, novelist, dramatist, journalist, poet, anthropologist, etc.) that constitutes his or her main area of literary production. Selected titles follow each author’s name (English titles are listed for those works in English translation), or in Spanish or Portuguese where no English translation exists; these books represent the authors’ best-known works and are recommended for those wishing to become familiar with the author’s work.

Caribbean Cuba Arrufat, Antón (poet and playwright, b. 1935) En claro Todos los domingos Augier, Ángel (poet, b. 1910) Todo el mar en la ola Isla en el tacto Ballagas, Emilio (poet, 1908-1954) Sabor eterno Elegía sin nombre y otros poemas Cabrera, Lydia (folklorist, 1900-1991) Supersticiones y buenos consejos Afro-Cuban Tales Casaus, Victor (essayist, b. 1944) Girón en la memoria Ojos sobre el pañuelo, Los Díaz, Jesús (novelist, b. 1941) Canto de amor y de guerra Años duros, Los 871

More Latino Writers

Díaz Martínez, Manuel (poet, b. 1936) Poesía inconclusa Mientras traza su curva el pez de fuego Carro de los mortales, El Eguren, Gustavo (novelist, b. 1925) Pingüinos, Los Alguien llama a la puerta Algo para la palidez y una ventana sobre el regreso Fernández Retamar, Roberto (poet and essayist, b. 1930) Caliban and Other Essays Aquí Algo semejante a los monstruos antediluvianos Fornet, Ambrosio (essayist, b. 1932) Paso del diluvio, Un En tres y dos Cuentos de la revolución cubana Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga, Gertrudis (novelist, 18141873) Diario de amor Cuahtemoc, the Last Aztec Emperor Labrador Ruiz, Enrique (novelist, 1902-1991) Trailer de sueños Cartas a la carte Anteo Loynaz, Dulce María (novelist, 1902-1997) Juegos de agua Carta de amor de Tut-ank-amen Montero, Mayra (novelist, b. 1952) Red of His Shadow, The Last Night I Spent with You, The Deep Purple Morejón, Nancy (poet, b. 1944) Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing Richard trajó su flauta y otros poemas Mutismos Novas Calvo, Lino (essayist, 1905-1983) Maneras de contar Cayo Canas 872

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Ortiz, Fernando (essayist, 1881-1969) Etnía y sociedad Cuban Counterpoint, Tobacco and Sugar Padilla, Heberto (novelist, 1932-2000) Sent Off the Field House of Stone, A Heroes Are Grazing in My Garden Piglia, Ricardo (novelist, b. 1941) Respiración artificial Nombre falso Invasión Piñera, Virgilio (novelist, 1912-1979) Cuentos fríos Aire frío Pita Rodríguez, Felix (short-story writer, b. 1909) Vietnam o notas de un diario Carlos Enríquez Sarusky, Jaime (novelist, b. 1931) Tiempo de los desconocidos Rebelión en la octava casa Soler Puig, José (novelist, b. 1916) Pan dormido Macho y la guanaja Triana, José (playwright, b. 1931) Modern Stage in Latin America Medea en el espejo Villaverde, Cirilo (novelist, 1812-1894) Teresa General Lopez, the Cuban Patriot Zamacois, Eduardo (novelist, 1878-1972) Opinión ajena, La Loca de amor

Dominican Republic Cabral, Manuel del (poet, 1907-1999) Trópico negro Doce poemas negros 873

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Cartagena Portalatín, Aida (poet, b. 1918) Woman Alone, A Voz, La Tierra escrita, La Henríquez Ureña, Pedro (essayist, 1884-1946) Plenitud de América Desde Washington Incháustegui Cabral, Héctor (novelist, 1912-1979) En soledad de amor herido Casi de ayer Mir, Pedro (poet, b. 1913) Poesías casi completas Buen viaje Amen de mariposas Trinidad and Tobago Palacios, Lucila (novelist, b. 1902) Teresa Carreño Ayer violento

Central America Costa Rica Chase, Alfonso (poet, b. 1945) Cuerpos Árbol del tiempo, El Fallas, Carlos Luis (novelist, 1909-1966) Mi madrina Marcos Ramírez Mamita Yunai García Monge, Joaquín (novelist, 1881-1958) Hijas del campo Abnegación Herra, Rafael Ángel (novelist, b. 1943) Hablemos de teatro Cosas de este mundo, Las Istarú, Ana (poet, b. 1960) Baby Boom en el Paraiso 874

More Latino Writers

Naranjo, Carmen (novelist, b. 1928) There Never Was a Once upon a Time Camino al mediodía Odio, Eunice (short-story writer, 1922-1974) Territorio del alba y otros poemas Elementos terrestres, Los Oreamuno, Yolanda (novelist, 1916-1956) Relatos escogidos Lo largo del corto camino El Salvador Argueta, Manlio (novelist and poet, b. 1936) En el costado de la luz De aquí en adelante Dalton, Roque (poet, 1935-1975) Salvador at War Militant Poetry Escobar Galindo, David (poet, b. 1943) Universo neutral Grieta en el agua, Una Fábulas Lars, Claudía (poet, 1899-1974) Tierra de infancia Casa de vídrio Lindo, Hugo (novelist, 1917-1985) Ways of Rain Libro de horas Aquí se cuentan cuentos Salarrué [Salvador Salazar Arrué] (novelist, 1899-1975) Catleya luna Cuentos de barro Guatemala Arévalo Martínez, Rafael (poet, 1884-1975) Nights in the Nunciature Palace Life, A Arias, Arturo (novelist, b. 1950) Norte, El After the Bombs 875

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Bibliography Contents Anthologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 909 General Studies and Reference Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 910 Colonialism and Postcolonialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 911 Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 913 Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 914 Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 916 Politics, Modernity, and Migration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 917 Race . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 919 Sexuality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 920 Theater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 921 Women’s Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 923 Anthologies Carlson, Lori Marie, ed. Cool Salsa: Bilingual Poems on Growing Up Latino in the United States. New York: Henry Holt, 1994. _______. Red Hot Salsa: Bilingual Poems on Being Young and Latino in the United States. New York: Henry Holt, 2005. Del Rio, Eduardo R. The Prentice Hall Anthology of Latino Literature. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2001. Gonzalez, Ray, ed. Currents from the Dancing River: Contemporary Latino Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Kanellos, Nicolás, ed. Hispanic American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Ortiz Cofer, Judith, ed. Riding Low Through the Streets of Gold: Latino Literature for Young Adults. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 2004. Salas, Teresa Cajiao, and Margarita Vargas, eds. Women Writing Women: An Anthology of Spanish-American Theater of the 1980’s. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Stavans, Ilan, ed. Wáchale! Poetry and Prose About Growing up Latino in America. Chicago: Cricket Books, 2001. Ventura, Gabriela Baeza. U.S. Latino Literature Today. New York: Longman, 2004. 909

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General Studies and Reference Works Augenbraum, Harold, and Margarite Fernández Olmos. U.S. Latino Literature: A Critical Guide for Students and Teachers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Balderston, Daniel, and Mike Gonzalez, eds. Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003. New York: Routledge, 2004. Bloom, Harold, ed. Hispanic-American Writers: Modern Critical Views. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998. Contemporary Hispanic Biography. 4 vols. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2002. Fitz, Earl E. Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. Flores, Angel. Spanish American Authors: The Twentieth Century. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1992. Foster, David W., and Daniel Altamirada, eds. Spanish American Literature: A Collection of Essays. 5 vols. New York: Routledge, 1997. Foster, David W., and Virginia R. Foster, eds. Modern Latin American Literature. New York: Ungar, 1975. Gonzalez, Juan. Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. New York: Penguin, 2001. González Echevarría, Roberto, and Enrique Pupo-Walker, eds. The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. 3 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Herrera-Sobek, Maria, and Virginia Sánchez Korrol, eds. Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage. Vol. 3. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 2000. Kanellos, Nicolás, ed. The Hispanic American Almanac: A Reference Work on Hispanics in the United States. 3d ed. Detroit: Gale, 2002. _______. Hispanic Literature of the United States: A Comprehensive Reference. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. Kevane, Bridget A., ed. Latino Literature in America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. Lindfors, Bernth, and Ann González, comps. African, Caribbean, and Latin-American Writers. 3 vols. Detroit: Gale, 2000. 910

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Luis, William, and Ann González, eds. Modern Latin-American Fiction Writers. Detroit: Gale, 1994. Martínez, Julio A., and Francisco A. Lomelí, eds. Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. Meyer, Nicholas E., ed. Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Americans. 2d ed. New York: Facts on File, 2002. Millington, Mark I., and Paul Julian Smith, eds. New Hispanisms: Literature, Culture, Theory. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1994. Ocasio, Rafael. Literature of Latin America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. Sayers Peden, Margaret. The Latin American Short Story: A Critical History. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Smith, Verity, ed. Concise Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000. Sole, Carlos A., ed. Latin American Writers. 3 vols. New York: Charles Scribner, 1989. Stavans, Ilan. The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Valdés, Mario J., and Djelal Kadir, eds. Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. West-Durán, Alan, ed. Latino and Latina Writers. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004. Colonialism and Postcolonialism Abbott, Don Paul. Rhetoric in the New World: Rhetorical Theory and Practice in Colonial Spanish America. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Arias, Santa, and Mariselle Meléndez, eds. Mapping Colonial Spanish America: Places and Commonplaces of Identity, Culture, and Experience. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2002. Armstrong, Jeanne. Demythologizing the Romance of Conquest. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 2002. 911

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Bauer, Ralph. The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Bolaños, Alvaro Félix, and Gustavo Verdesio, eds. Colonialism Past and Present: Reading and Writing About Colonial Latin America Today. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Cevallos-Candau, Francisco Javier, Jeffrey A. Cole, Nina M. Scott, and Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz. Coded Encounters: Writing, Gender, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Greene, Roland. Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Ibsen, Kristine. Women’s Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. Johnson, Julie Greer. Satire in Colonial Spanish America: Turning the New World Upside Down. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Kagan, Richard L, ed. Spain in America: The Origins of Hispanism in the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Larsen, Neil. Reading North by South: On Latin American Literature, Culture, and Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. 2d ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Promis Ojeda, José. The Identity of Hispanoamerica: An Interpretation of Colonial Literature. Translated by Alita Kelley and Alec E. Kelley. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991. Schlau, Stacey. Spanish American Women’s Use of the Word: Colonial Through Contemporary Narratives. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. Thurner, Mark, and Andrés Guerrero, eds. After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. Toro, Fernando de. New Intersections: Essays on Culture and Literature in the Post-Modern and Post-Colonial Condition. Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1993. 912

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Fiction Alonso, Carlos J. The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Avelar, Idelber. The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics, and Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Balderston, Daniel, comp. The Latin American Short Story: An Annotated Guide to Anthologies and Criticism. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992. Blayer, Irene Maria F., and Mark Cronlund Anderson, eds. Latin American Narratives and Cultural Identity: Selected Readings. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Latin American Fiction. New York: Chelsea House, 1990. Brotherston, Gordon. The Emergence of the Latin American Novel. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Chandler, Richard E., and Kessel Schwartz. A New History of Spanish American Fiction. Rev. ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. Craft, Linda J. Novels of Testimony and Resistance from Central America. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997. D’Lugo, Carol Clark. The Fragmented Novel in Mexico: The Politics of Form. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Faris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004. González Echevarría, Roberto. Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Hart, Stephen M. White Ink: Essays on Twentieth-Century Feminine Fiction in Spain and Latin America. London: Tamesis, 1993. Kanellos, Nicolás, ed. Short Fiction by Hispanic Writers of the United States. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1993. Larson, Ross. Fantasy and Imagination in the Mexican Narrative. Tempe: Arizona State University Center for Latin American Studies, 1977. Maiorino, Giancarlo. The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 913

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Martinez, Elizabeth Coonrod. Before the Boom: Latin American Revolutionary Novels of the 1920’s. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2001. Niebylski, Dianna C. Humoring Resistance: Laughter and the Excessive Body in Latin American Women’s Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Nunn, Frederick M. Collisions with History: Latin American Fiction and Social Science from El Boom to the New World Order. Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 2001. O’Connor, Patrick. Latin American Fiction and the Narratives of the Perverse: Paper Dolls and Spider Women. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Schroeder, Shannin. Rediscovering Magical Realism in the Americas. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Shaw, Donald L. The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Swanson, Philip. Latin American Fiction: A Short Introduction. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005. _______. The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture After the Boom. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1995. Williams, Raymond L. The Postmodern Novel in Latin America: Politics, Culture, and the Crisis of Truth. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Identity Allatson, Paul. Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary. New York: Rodopi, 2002. Aparicio, Frances R., and Susana Chávez-Silverman, eds. Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997. Castillo, Debra A. Redreaming America: Toward a Bilingual American Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Castro-Klarén, Sara, and John Charles Chasteen, eds. Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003. 914

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Cooper, Sara E. The Ties That Bind: Questioning Family Dynamics and Family Discourse in Hispanic Literature. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2004. Durán-Cogan, Mercedes F., and Antonio Gómez-Moriana, eds. National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America. New York: Routledge, 2001. Feracho, Lesley. Linking the Americas: Race, Hybrid Discourses, and the Reformulation of Feminine Identity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Flores, Juan. From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and the Latino Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Fox, Geoffrey. Hispanic Nation: Culture, Politics, and the Constructing of Identity. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997. Gish, Robert Franklin. Beyond Bounds: Cross-Cultural Essays on Anglo, American Indian, and Chicano Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Gutmann, Matthew C., ed. Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. Karem, Jeff. The Romance of Authenticity: The Cultural Politics of Regional and Ethnic Literatures. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Kushigian, Julia. Reconstructing Childhood: Strategies of Reading for Culture and Gender in the Spanish American Bildungsroman. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2003. Paz-Soldán, Edmundo, and Debra A. Castillo. Latin American Literature and Mass Media. New York: Garland, 2001. Pérez, Janet, and Wendell Aycock, eds. Climate and Literature: Reflections of Environment. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1995. Ryan-Ranson, Helen, ed. Imagination, Emblems, and Expressions: Essays on Latin American, Caribbean, and Continental Culture and Identity. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993. Sá, Lúcia. Rain Forest Literatures: Amazonian Texts and Latin American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Saldaña-Portillo, Josefina. “Who’s the Indian in Aztlán? Rewriting Mestizaje, Indianism, and Chicanismo from the Lacandón.” In The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, ed915

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Hart, Stephen M. Spanish, Catalan, and Spanish-American Poetry from Modernismo to the Spanish Civil War: The Hispanic Connection. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1990. Jenkins, Lee M. The Language of Caribbean Poetry: Boundaries of Expression. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. Kuhnheim, Jill S. Spanish American Poetry at the End of the Twentieth Century: Textual Disruptions. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Lewis, Marvin A. Afro-Hispanic Poetry, 1940-1980: From Slavery to Negritud in South American Verse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983. Menes, Orlando Ricardo, ed. Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press, 2004. Murray, Frederick W. The Aesthetics of Contemporary Spanish American Social Protest Poetry. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1990. Oliphant, Dave. On a High Horse: Views Mostly of Latin American and Texan Poetry. Fort Worth, Tex.: Prickly Pear Press, 1983. Pérez-Torres, Rafael. Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Rowe, William. Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and the Inner Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Ruiz, Reynaldo, ed. Hispanic Poetry in Los Angeles, 1850-1900. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 2000. Spooner, David. The Poem and the Insect: Aspects of Twentieth Century Hispanic Culture. San Francisco: International Scholars, 1999. Politics, Modernity, and Migration Alonso, Carlos J. The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Altamirano, Teófilo, and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, eds. Migrants, Regional Identities and Latin American Cities. Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 1997. Alvarez-Borland, Isabel. Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. 917

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Beverly, John, and Marc Zimmerman. Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Conlogue, William. Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Dove, Patrick. The Catastrophe of Modernity: Tragedy and the Nation in Latin American Literature. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2004. Franco, Jean. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Garza-Falcón, Leticia. Gente Decente: A Borderlands Response to the Rhetoric of Dominance. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Geist, Anthony L., and José B. Monleón, eds. Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America. New York: Garland, 1999. Gonzales-Berry, Erlinda, ed. Paso por aqui: Critical Essays on the New Mexican Literary Tradition, 1542-1988. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. Hernandez, Guillermo E. Chicano Satire: A Study in Literary Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Kaup, Monika. Rewriting North American Borders in Chicano and Chicana Narrative. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. Larrain, Jorge. Identity and Modernity in Latin America. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000. McClennen, Sophia A. The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language, and Space in Hispanic Literatures. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2004. Martinez, Manuel Luis. Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Mujcinovic, Fatima. Postmodern Cross-Culturalism and Politicization in U.S. Latina Literature: From Ana Castillo to Julia Alvarez. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Muller, Gilbert H. New Strangers in Paradise: The Immigrant Experience and Contemporary American Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. 918

Bibliography

Saldívar, Ramón. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Sommer, Doris, ed. The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited in Latin America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. Race Bost, Suzanne. Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850-2000. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Brogan, Kathleen. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. Cox, Timothy J. Postmodern Tales of Slavery in the Americas: From Alejo Carpentier to Charles Johnson. New York: Garland, 2001. Domínguez, Jorge I., ed. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. New York: Garland, 1994. Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Ellis, Robert Richmond. They Dream Not of Angels but of Men: Homoeroticism, Gender, and Race in Latin American Autobiography. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Feracho, Lesley. Linking the Americas: Race, Hybrid Discourses, and the Reformulation of Feminine Identity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Hedrick, Tace. Mestizo Modernism: Race, Nation, and Identity in Latin American Culture, 1900-1940. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Hiraldo, Carlos. Segregated Miscegenation: On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the U.S. and Latin American Literary Ttraditions. New York: Routledge, 2003. Jackson, Richard. Black Writers and the Hispanic Canon. New York: Twayne, 1997. Jehenson, Myriam Yvonne. Latin-American Women Writers: Class, Race, and Gender. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. John, Catherine A. Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings 919

Bibliography

and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. Kaup, Monika, and Debra J. Rosenthal, eds. Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American Literary Dialogues. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Keizer, Arlene R. Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. Luis, William. Dance Between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature Written in the United States. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001. Smith, Paul Julian. Representing the Other: “Race,” Text, and Gender in Spanish and Spanish American Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Wade, Peter. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. Chicago: Pluto Press, 1997. Williams, Claudette M. Charcoal and Cinnamon: The Politics of Color in Spanish Caribbean Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Sexuality Alarcon, Norma, Ana Castillo, and Cherrie Moraga, eds. The Sexuality of Latinas. Berkeley, Calif.: Third Woman Press, 1993. Bacarisse, Pamela, ed. Carnal Knowledge: Essays on the Flesh, Sex, and Sexuality in Hispanic Letters and Film. Pittsburgh: Ediciones Tres Rios, 1993. Balderston, Daniel, and Donna J. Guy, eds. Sex and Sexuality in Latin America. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Bejel, Emilio. Gay Cuban Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Bergmann, Emilie L., and Paul Julian Smith, eds. Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995. Chávez-Silverman, Susana, and Librada Hernández, eds. Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American, and Spanish Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. 920

Bibliography

Contreras, Daniel. Unrequited Love and Gay Latino Culture: What Have You Done to My Heart? New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Costa, María Dolores, ed. Latina Lesbian Writers and Artists. Binghamton, N.Y.: Harrington Park Press, 2003. Foster, David W. El Ambiente Nuestro: Chicano/Latino Homoerotic Writing. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 2005. _______. Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. _______. Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. _______, ed. Chicano/Latino Homoerotic Identities. New York: Garland, 1999. Foster, David W., and Roberto Reis, eds. Bodies and Biases: Sexualities in Hispanic Cultures and Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Smith, Paul Julian. The Body Hispanic: Gender and Sexuality in Spanish and Spanish American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. _______. Laws of Desire: Questions of Homosexuality in Spanish Writing and Film, 1960-1990. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. _______. Vision Machines: Cinema, Literature, and Sexuality in Spain and Cuba, 1983-93. New York: Verso, 1996. Torres, Lourdes, and Inmaculada Pertusa, eds. Tortilleras: Hispanic and U.S. Latina Lesbian Expression. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. Vilaseca, David. Hindsight and the Real: Subjectivity in Gay Hispanic Autobiography. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Zimmerman, Bonnie. The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction, 1969-1989. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. Theater Albuquerque, Severino João Medeiros. Violent Acts: A Study of Contemporary Latin American Theatre. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. 921

Bibliography

Bottoms, Stephen J. Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960’s Off-Off Broadway Movement. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Broyles-Gonzales, Yolanda. El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Dauster, Frank, ed. Perspectives on Contemporary Spanish American Theatre. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1996. Flores, Yolanda. The Drama of Gender: Feminist Theater by Women of the Americas. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. France, Anna Kay, and P. J. Corso, eds. International Women Playwrights: Voices of Identity and Transformation. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1993. Gladhart, Amalia. The Leper in Blue: Coercive Performance and the Contemporary Latin American Theater. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Juan-Navarro, Santiago, and Theodore Robert Young, eds. A Twice-Told Tale: Reinventing the Encounter in Iberian/Iberian American Literature and Film. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Larson, Catherine. Games and Play in the Theater of Spanish American Women. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2004. Larson, Catherine, and Margarita Vargas, eds. Latin American Women Dramatists: Theater, Texts, and Theories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Milleret, Margo. Latin American Women On/In Stages. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Ramos-García, Luis A, ed. The State of Latino Theater in the United States: Hybridity, Transculturation, and Identity. New York: Routledge, 2002. Reinelt, Janice, ed. Crucibles of Crisis: Performing Social Change. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Román, David. Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Salas, Teresa Cajiao, et al. “Women’s Voices in Hispanic Theater.” In International Women Playwrights: Voices of Identity and Transformation, edited by Anna Kay France and P. J. Corso. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1993. 922

Bibliography

Sandoval-Sanchez, Alberto, and Nancy Saporta Sternbach. Stages of Life: Transcultural Performance and Identity in U.S. Latina Theater. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. Women’s Studies Adjarian, M. M. Allegories of Desire: Body, Nation, and Empire in Modern Caribbean Literature by Women. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Agosín, Marjorie, ed. A Dream of Light and Shadow: Portraits of Latin American Women Writers. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Amador Gómez-Quintero, Raysa Elena, and Mireya Pérez Bustillo. The Female Body: Perspectives of Latin American Artists. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Anim-Addo, Joan. Touching the Body: African Caribbean Women’s Writing. London: Mango, 2004. Anim-Addo, Joan, ed. Centre of Remembrance: Memory and Caribbean Women’s Literature. London: Mango, 2004. Aquino, María Pilar, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodríguez, eds. A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Barbas-Rhoden, Laura. Writing Women in Central America: Gender and the Fictionalization of History. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. Brevard, Lisa Pertillar. Womensaints: The Saintly Portrayal of Select African-American and Latina Cultural Heroines. New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2002. Browdy de Hernandez, Jennifer, ed. Women Writing Resistance: Essays from Latin America and the Caribbean. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2003. Brown, Julie, ed. American Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Garland, 1995. Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth, ed. Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Twentieth-Century Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Castillo, Debra A., and María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba. Border Women: Writing from La Frontera. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 923

Bibliography

Condé, L. P., and S. M. Hart, eds. Feminist Readings on Spanish and Latin-American Literature. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1991. Davies, Catherine, ed. Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Spain and Spanish America. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1993. Franco, Jean. Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. García Pinto, Magdalena, ed. Women Writers of Latin America: Intimate Histories. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Gonzalez, Maria C. Contemporary Mexican-American Women Novelists: Toward a Feminist Identity. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Green, Carol Hurd, and Mary Grimley Mason. American Women Writers. New York: Continuum, 1994. Horno-Delgado, Asunción, eds, et al. Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. Hurley, Teresa M. Mothers and Daughters in Post-revolutionary Mexican Literature. Rochester, N.Y.: Tamesis, 2002. Jones, Anny Brooksbank, and Catherine Davies, eds. Latin American Women’s Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Kafka, Phillipa. “Saddling la gringa”: Gatekeeping in Literature by Contemporary Latina Writers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Kaminsky, Amy K. Reading the Body Politic: Feminist Criticism and Latin American Women Writers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Kaup, Monika. Mad Intertextuality: Madness in Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1993. McCracken, Ellen. New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999. Madsen, Deborah L. Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Medeiros-Lichem, María Teresa. Reading the Feminine Voice in Latin American Women’s Fiction: From Teresa de la Parra to Elena Poniatowska and Luisa Valenzuela. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Miller, Beth, ed. Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. — Anna A. Moore 924

Electronic Resources Electronic Databases Electronic databases are integrated electronic sources to which public, college, and university libraries subscribe, installing links on their Web sites, where they are only available to library card holders or specified patrons. Readers can check library Web sites to see if these databases are installed or can ask reference librarians if these databases are available.

General Academic Search Premier The world’s largest scholarly full-text database, Academic Search Premier has indexed and created abstracts for more than 8000 journals, some of which—for example, Latin American Literary Review, which is written for the general public—will be of direct interest. The database also includes thousands of peerreviewed publications. First Search Commonly found in academic libraries, this system covers dozens of databases, some of which have links to full-text articles. Students of Latino literature will find helpful information in the Contemporary Women’s Issues, Dissertation Abstracts, MLA Bibliography, Wilson Select, and WorldCat databases. Gale Virtual Reference Library The database contains more than 85 reference books, including encyclopedias and almanacs, allowing users to quickly find information about a broad range of subjects. J-STOR J-STOR has organized hundreds of journals in both single and multi-disciplinary formats in order to streamline the search process. Their collection includes several journals on Latin American history, as well as the literary journals Hispania and Hispanic Review. 925

Electronic Resources

Oxford Reference Online A virtual reference library of more than 100 dictionaries and reference books published by Oxford University Press. Oxford Reference Online contains information about a broad range of subjects, including art, architecture, military history, science, religion, philosophy, political and social science, and literature. The site also features English language and bilingual dictionaries, as well as collections of quotations and proverbs.

Latin America and Other Subject-Specific Databases America: History and Life; Historical Abstracts This database, produced by ABC-CLIO, provides access to a number of important literary journals and some books. America: History and Life focuses on North America and Mexico; information on South America is in Historical Abstracts. Arts and Humanities Citation Index This database allows users to search across disciplines to find bibliographic and reference material in more than a thousand scholarly journals. Biography Resource Center This database, produced by Thomson Gale, includes biographies of more than 320,000 prominent people from throughout the world and from a wide range of disciplines. Searches for Latino authors returned an average of 200 hits. Chicano Database The Chicano Database is produced by the University of California-Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies Department. Its creators have broadened the definition of Chicano to include anyone of Mexican descent living in the United States. As a result, the information available in the database ranges from literature and women’s studies to social work. It is particularly useful for information about El Teatro Campesino, as well as for Chicano poetry and fiction. 926


ClasePeriodica This system enables users to find documents published in 2,600 Latin American journals. Clase is devoted to research in the social sciences and humanities; Periodicas specializes in the sciences and technology. Results include conference proceedings, interviews, essays, articles, and books. The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry Columbia University Press compiles thousands of works by hundreds of poets (more than 200 of Pablo Neruda’s poems are indexed, for example) in this database, which also includes a comprehensive glossary of poetry-related terms. Biographies and critical essays are available for some writers, and users can search for anthologies by title, category, and editor. Contemporary Authors Thomson Gale’s database organizes biographical information on approximately 112,000 novelists whose work has been published since 1960. Contemporary Literary Criticism Select Published by Thomson Gale, this system catalogs critical essays on approximately 600 major authors. Students can search by author, title, and subject. Ethnic News Watch This database functions in both English and Spanish, combing through half a million articles that have appeared in minority and indigenous publications since 1990. Archived material from the mid-1980’s is also available. An especially useful resource for hard-to-find newspaper and magazine articles. Fuente Académica This Spanish-language database provides full-text links to more than 150 academic journals. GLBT Life This database is devoted to discussing issues related to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues. The system searches dozens of periodicals specializing in GLBT issues; students will find a number of reviews, interviews, and other articles on such 927


authors as Manuel Puig, Maria Irene Fornes, and Richard Rodriguez. Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI) This valuable resource from the University of California-Los Angeles indexes the books, articles, essays, reviews, and many other printed materials that have been produced in and about Latin America over the past twenty-five years. Increasingly, the citations are linked to the full text. More than 400 periodicals are searched regularly for information about Latinos in the United States, the U.S.-Mexican border, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. History Reference Center A product of EBSCO Information Services, the History Reference Center is a comprehensive world history database. It contains the contents of more than 650 encyclopedias and other books, the full text of articles published in about 60 history periodicals, and thousands of historical documents, biographies, photographs, and maps. Latin American Women Writers Alexander Street Press has assembled a system organizing the memoirs, letters, essays, and works (most are in Spanish only) of Latin American women since the 1600’s. Students can combine a number of parameters, including: subject (independence, slavery, love), word, time period, literary movement, birth and death dates, and country of origin. Latino Literature: Poetry, Drama, and Fiction Alexander Street Press’s highly regarded database focuses on Latino literature in English (although some major works are in Spanish), and places most of its emphasis on writers in the United States after 1850. It includes several hundred novels and plays, and several thousand pages of poetry. Users can narrow their search fields according to a work’s major themes, the author’s gender, heritage, frequency of word use, and other criteria. 928


Libros en Venta This system chronicles all Spanish-language books—both in and out of print—published since 1964. In addition to basic bibliographic information, researchers can also find contact information for publishers and sales distributors. Literature Resource Center Literature Resource Center, produced by Thomson Gale, includes biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of authors from a wide range of literary disciplines, countries, and eras. The database also features plot summaries, the full text of articles from literary journals, critical essays, and links to Web sites. Users can search by author nationality, theme, literary movement, and genre; for example, a search for Hispanic and Mexican American authors returned 119 results. MagillOnLiteraturePlus Salem Press has placed many of its literature reference sources on this database, including Masterplots, Cyclopedia of World Authors, Cyclopedia of Literary Characters, and World Philosophers and Their Works. The database covers the works of more than 8,500 writers, poets, dramatists, essayists, and philosophers, featuring plot summaries, critical analyses, biographical essays, character profiles, and up-to-date lists of each author’s works. Searches can be narrowed according to author’s national and cultural identity and literary characters and locales, among other fields; for example, a search for Latino authors returned 292 results. MLA International Bibliography Thousands of journals and book citations can be found in the Modern Language Association’s electronic bibliography, which is a particularly valuable source of literary theory and critical articles. Sur Database This is the online edition of the prominent Latin American literary magazine (1931-1992). It includes images, advertisements, and a searchable index of more than six thousand articles. 929


World History FullText A joint product of EBSCO Information Services and ABCCLIO, this database provides a global view of history with information on a wide range of topics, including anthropology, art, culture, economics, government, heritage, military history, politics, regional issues, and sociology. World History Online Facts on File, Inc., has created this reference database of world history, featuring biographies, time lines, maps, charts, and other information. Wilson Biographies Illustrated Produced by H. W. Wilson Co., this database offers more than 95,000 biographies and obituaries, and more than 26,000 photographs, of prominent people throughout history.

Web Sites The sites listed below were visited by the editors of Salem Press in March 2005. Because URLs frequently change or are moved, the accuracy of these sites cannot be guaranteed; however, long-standing sites—such as those of university departments, national organizations, and government agencies—generally maintain links when sites move or upgrade their offerings. Association for Hispanic Classical Theater, Inc. http://www.trinity.edu/org/comedia/index.html This site contains texts for a number of plays, most of which were written during the Golden Age of Spanish Theater (15801680). Some of the plays have been translated into English, and a few critical essays are also included. Brazilian Literature http://www.unm.edu/~osterloh/BrazLit/BrazLit.htm This page contains a number of links and information on print-based sources that students of Brazilian, African Brazilian, and Luso Brazilian literatures may find helpful. 930


The Chicano Literature Index http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/bailey/mexamlit.htm A Web site that gives general references, short biographies, lists of major works, and links to other sites about major contemporary Mexican American writers. Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) http://www.chicano.ucla.edu/ The CSRC is based at the University of California-Los Angeles and is home to significant amounts of important material related to the Chicano movement (online access to the collection is pending). The prestigious journal Aztlán is also based at the CSRC, and its contents are listed on the site. Cultures of the Andes http://www.andes.org/ Visitors to this site will find original poetry in Quechua, a direct descendant of the language spoken by the Incas that is still common in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. Poems are translated into Spanish and English. Also available are short stories (in Spanish and English) about life in this often-isolated region. El Andar http://elandar.com El Andar bills itself as “a national magazine for Latino discourse,” a claim supported by the intelligent and accessible essays and wide array of fiction, poetry, and essays published each month. Highlights of the online edition include readings by prominent Latin American poets of their own work. Gay and Lesbian Themes in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/exhibitions/ sw25/case9.html Part of the Columbia University exhibition “Stonewall and Beyond: Lesbian and Gay Culture,” this page features an essay that locates homosexuality’s meaning within Latin American tradition and points out some of the most important differences between North and Latin American perceptions of sexuality. A list of notable literary works is also included. 931


Handbook of Latin American Studies (HLAS) http://lcweb2.loc.gov/hlas/ The HLAS is an annotated bibliography maintained and updated by the Library of Congress. It includes abstracts for entries, and is useful for locating books, articles, chapters, and papers on almost any topic related to Latin America, covering more than sixty years of scholarly research in the field. An essential starting point for serious research. Hispanic Culture Review http://www.gmu.edu/org/hcr/ The online version of this journal, published by students at George Mason University, includes the journal’s recent and present contents (poetry, short narrative, essays, and book reviews) and has a number of useful (mostly Spanish-language) links, including George Mason’s “The Spanish Page.” Las Culturas.com http://www.lasculturas.com/lib/libAuthors.htm An annotated list of links to various webpages about specific authors, sorted alphabetically. Information available varies by author, but several pages contain interviews, images, criticism and official Web sites. Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC) http://www1.lanic.utexas.edu/la/region/literature/ LANIC is one of the most comprehensive resources available for information about and direct links to institutions, publications, and projects throughout Latin America. The site has devoted a section to every topic imaginable, and their literature pages—a few of which are in English—are categorized by country, theme, and author. Links to dozens of magazines, journals, and awards as well as region-wide sites are also listed. Literature of South America http://gosouthamerica.about.com/od/literature1/ This site, created by About.com, consists largely of book reviews, short stories, biographies of prominent novelists and other information, sorted by country. Only South American countries are featured. 932


Portals to the World: Resources Selected by Library of Congress Subject Experts http://www.loc.gov/rr/international/hispanic/countries/ countries.html The Library of Congress has collected web addresses for sites specializing in specific Latin American languages and dialects, authors, and types of literature, all organized by country. Links are generally to Spanish-language pages. An extremely useful resource for those with some knowledge of the language. Proyecto Sherezade http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/%7Efernand4/ This Spanish-language site has devoted itself to the preservation and presentation of Latin America’s strong tradition of fiction. Many of its stories have been chosen as aids for Spanishlanguage teachers. Each piece is introduced by the webmaster, and a number of author interviews are posted. Voice of the Shuttle http://vos.ucsb.edu/ The section titled “Literatures (Other Than English)” contains some useful links to biographies, timelines, and excerpts from works by prominent authors, such as Jorge Luis Borges and Mario Vargas Llosa. However, some of the more general links are outdated. — Anna A. Moore

933

Chronological List of Authors Below, authors who are covered in these volumes are arranged chronologically by year of birth. To 1800 1581 Juan Ruiz de Alarcón 1648 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 1776 José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi 1801-1900 1803 José María Heredia 1834 Ignacio Manuel Altamirano 1834 José Hernández 1839 Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis 1841 W. H. Hudson 1853 José Julián Martí 1866 Euclides da Cunha 1867 Rubén Darío 1871 Enrique González Martínez 1873 Mariano Azuela 1875 Florencio Sánchez 1878 Horacio Quiroga 1883 Hugo Wast 1884 Eduardo Barrios 1884 Rómulo Gallegos 1886 Ricardo Güiraldes 1887 Martín Luis Guzmán 1889 Gabriela Mistral 1889 Alfonso Reyes 1890 José Rubén Romero 1892 César Vallejo 1893 Mário de Andrade 1899 Miguel Ángel Asturias 934

Chronological List of Authors

1899 Jorge Luis Borges 1900 Roberto Arlt 1901-1910 1901 Jesús Colón 1901 José Lins do Rego 1902 Carlos Drummond de Andrade 1902 Nicolás Guillén 1903 Alejandro Casona 1903 Eduardo Mallea 1904 Alejo Carpentier 1904 Pablo Neruda 1904 Agustín Yáñez 1905 Ernesto Galarza 1905 Rodolfo Usigli 1906 Jorge Icaza 1908 João Guimarães Rosa 1909 Demetrio Aguilera Malta 1909 Ciro Alegría 1909 Juan Carlos Onetti 1910 María Luisa Bombal 1910 José Lezama Lima 1910 Rachel de Queiroz 1911-1920 1911 Ernesto Sábato 1912 Jorge Amado 1914 Adolfo Bioy Casares 1914 Julia de Burgos 1914 Julio Cortázar 1914 Nicanor Parra 1914 Octavio Paz 1917 Augusto Roa Bastos 1918 Juan José Arreola 1918 Juan Rulfo 1919 Isidora Aguirre 1919 Jose Yglesias 935


1921-1930 1921 Raymond Barrio 1924 Claribel Alegría 1924 José Donoso 1924 Osman Lins 1924 José Antonio Villarreal 1925 Ernesto Cardenal 1925 Carlos Castaneda 1925 Clarice Lispector 1928 Carlos Fuentes 1928 Griselda Gambaro 1928 Gabriel García Márquez 1928 Piri Thomas 1929 Guillermo Cabrera Infante 1929 Rolando Hinojosa 1930 Maria Irene Fornes 1931-1940 1932 Manuel Puig 1932 Maruxa Vilalta 1933 Elena Poniatowska 1934 John Rechy 1935 Lionel G. García 1935 Nicholasa Mohr 1935 Tomás Rivera 1936 Ignácio de Loyola Brandão 1936 Luis Rafael Sánchez 1936 Mario Vargas Llosa 1937 Rudolfo Anaya 1937 Severo Sarduy 1938 Rosario Ferré 1938 Mary Helen Ponce 1938 Luisa Valenzuela 1939 Sheila Ortiz Taylor 1940 Eduardo Galeano 1940 Gustavo Sainz 1940 Luis Miguel Valdez 1940 Victor Villaseñor 936


1941-1950 1941 Nicholas Dante 1942 Isabel Allende 1942 Aristeo Brito 1942 Ariel Dorfman 1943 Reinaldo Arenas 1944 Alejandro Morales 1944 Richard Rodriguez 1944 Thomas Sanchez 1945 Lucha Corpi 1946 Miguel Piñero 1948 Denise Chávez 1949 Victor Hernández Cruz 1950 Julia Alvarez 1950 Laura Esquivel 1951-1960 1951 Oscar Hijuelos 1952 Jimmy Santiago Baca 1952 Judith Ortiz Cofer 1952 Alberto Ríos 1952 Gary Soto 1953 Ana Castillo 1953 Eduardo Machado 1954 Lorna Dee Cervantes 1954 Sandra Cisneros 1954 Helena María Viramontes 1957 Martín Espada 1958 Cristina García 19611961 Abraham Rodriguez, Jr. 1962 Virgil Suárez

937

Indexes

Genre Index ESSAYISTS Arlt, Roberto, 74 Arreola, Juan José, 79 Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 85 Borges, Jorge Luis, 127 Brandão, Ignácio de Loyola, 136 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 150 Carpentier, Alejo, 164 Castillo, Ana, 183 Colón, Jesús, 208 Cortázar, Julio, 216 Dorfman, Ariel, 256 Drummond de Andrade, Carlos, 262 Esquivel, Laura, 274 Ferré, Rosario, 285 Fuentes, Carlos, 295 Galeano, Eduardo, 309 Gambaro, Griselda, 321 García Márquez, Gabriel, 338 Guillén, Nicolás, 354 Güiraldes, Ricardo, 368 Guzmán, Martín Luis, 372 Hudson, W. H., 400 Lezama Lima, José, 409 Lins, Osman, 416 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, 438 Mallea, Eduardo, 444 Martí, José Julián, 450 Onetti, Juan Carlos, 480 Ortiz Cofer, Judith, 487 Paz, Octavio, 499 Poniatowska, Elena, 519 Queiroz, Rachel de, 533 Rodriguez, Richard, 580 Sábato, Ernesto, 606 Sarduy, Severo, 636 Valenzuela, Luisa, 681

Vallejo, César, 686 Viramontes, Helena María, 717 NONFICTION WRITERS Aguilera Malta, Demetrio, 1 Alegría, Ciro, 13 Alegría, Claribel, 20 Allende, Isabel, 27 Alvarez, Julia, 40 Amado, Jorge, 48 Anaya, Rudolfo A., 56 Andrade, Mário de, 63 Arenas, Reinaldo, 68 Arlt, Roberto, 74 Arreola, Juan José, 79 Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 85 Azuela, Mariano, 93 Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 99 Barrio, Raymond, 106 Bioy Casares, Adolfo, 114 Borges, Jorge Luis, 127 Brandão, Ignácio de Loyola, 136 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 150 Cardenal, Ernesto, 157 Carpentier, Alejo, 164 Castaneda, Carlos, 177 Castillo, Ana, 183 Colón, Jesús, 208 Cortázar, Julio, 216 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la, 224 Cruz, Victor Hernández, 229 Cunha, Euclides da, 235 Darío, Rubén, 245 Donoso, José, 250 Dorfman, Ariel, 256 Drummond de Andrade, Carlos, 262 Espada, Martín, 269 Esquivel, Laura, 274

941

Genre Index Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín, 280 Ferré, Rosario, 285 Fuentes, Carlos, 295 Galarza, Ernesto, 303 Galeano, Eduardo, 309 Gambaro, Griselda, 321 García, Cristina, 327 García Márquez, Gabriel, 338 González Martínez, Enrique, 346 Guillén, Nicolás, 354 Güiraldes, Ricardo, 368 Guzmán, Martín Luis, 372 Heredia, José María, 378 Hudson, W. H., 400 Lezama Lima, José, 409 Lins, Osman, 416 Lispector, Clarice, 426 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, 438 Mallea, Eduardo, 444 Martí, José Julián, 450 Mohr, Nicholasa, 463 Neruda, Pablo, 472 Onetti, Juan Carlos, 480 Ortiz Cofer, Judith, 487 Parra, Nicanor, 494 Paz, Octavio, 499 Ponce, Mary Helen, 514 Poniatowska, Elena, 519 Queiroz, Rachel de, 533 Reyes, Alfonso, 552 Ríos, Alberto, 558 Roa Bastos, Augusto, 570 Rodriguez, Richard, 580 Rulfo, Juan, 599 Sábato, Ernesto, 606 Sainz, Gustavo, 612 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 623 Sanchez, Thomas, 629 Sarduy, Severo, 636 Soto, Gary, 642 Taylor, Sheila Ortiz, 654 Thomas, Piri, 659 942

Usigli, Rodolfo, 666 Valenzuela, Luisa, 681 Vallejo, César, 686 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 692 Villaseñor, Victor, 711 Viramontes, Helena María, 717 Wast, Hugo, 723 Yáñez, Agustín, 727 Yglesias, Jose, 732 NOVELISTS Aguilera Malta, Demetrio, 1 Aguirre, Isidora, 7 Alegría, Ciro, 13 Alegría, Claribel, 20 Allende, Isabel, 27 Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel, 35 Alvarez, Julia, 40 Amado, Jorge, 48 Anaya, Rudolfo A., 56 Andrade, Mário de, 63 Arenas, Reinaldo, 68 Arlt, Roberto, 74 Arreola, Juan José, 79 Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 85 Azuela, Mariano, 93 Barrio, Raymond, 106 Barrios, Eduardo, 110 Bioy Casares, Adolfo, 114 Bombal, María Luisa, 120 Borges, Jorge Luis, 127 Brandão, Ignácio de Loyola, 136 Brito, Aristeo, 141 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 150 Carpentier, Alejo, 164 Castillo, Ana, 183 Chávez, Denise, 195 Cisneros, Sandra, 200 Corpi, Lucha, 212 Cortázar, Julio, 216 Cunha, Euclides da, 235 Donoso, José, 250 Dorfman, Ariel, 256 Esquivel, Laura, 274

Genre Index Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín, 280 Ferré, Rosario, 285 Fuentes, Carlos, 295 Galeano, Eduardo, 309 Gallegos, Rómulo, 316 Gambaro, Griselda, 321 García, Cristina, 327 García, Lionel G., 333 García Márquez, Gabriel, 338 Guimarães Rosa, João, 361 Güiraldes, Ricardo, 368 Guzmán, Martín Luis, 372 Hijuelos, Oscar, 387 Hinojosa, Rolando, 394 Hudson, W. H., 400 Icaza, Jorge, 405 Lezama Lima, José, 409 Lins, Osman, 416 Lins do Rego, José, 421 Lispector, Clarice, 426 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, 438 Mallea, Eduardo, 444 Martí, José Julián, 450 Mohr, Nicholasa, 463 Morales, Alejandro, 467 Neruda, Pablo, 472 Onetti, Juan Carlos, 480 Ortiz Cofer, Judith, 487 Ponce, Mary Helen, 514 Poniatowska, Elena, 519 Puig, Manuel, 526 Queiroz, Rachel de, 533 Quiroga, Horacio, 538 Rechy, John, 545 Rivera, Tomás, 564 Roa Bastos, Augusto, 570 Rodriguez, Abraham, Jr., 575 Romero, José Rubén, 587 Rulfo, Juan, 599 Sábato, Ernesto, 606 Sainz, Gustavo, 612 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 623

Sanchez, Thomas, 629 Sarduy, Severo, 636 Soto, Gary, 642 Suárez, Virgil, 649 Taylor, Sheila Ortiz, 654 Usigli, Rodolfo, 666 Valenzuela, Luisa, 681 Vallejo, César, 686 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 692 Vilalta, Maruxa, 700 Villarreal, José Antonio, 706 Villaseñor, Victor, 711 Viramontes, Helena María, 717 Wast, Hugo, 723 Yáñez, Agustín, 727 Yglesias, Jose, 732 PLAYWRIGHTS Aguilera Malta, Demetrio, 1 Aguirre, Isidora, 7 Amado, Jorge, 48 Anaya, Rudolfo A., 56 Arenas, Reinaldo, 68 Arlt, Roberto, 74 Arreola, Juan José, 79 Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 85 Azuela, Mariano, 93 Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 99 Barrio, Raymond, 106 Barrios, Eduardo, 110 Casona, Alejandro, 172 Chávez, Denise, 195 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la, 224 Dante, Nicholas, 241 Donoso, José, 250 Dorfman, Ariel, 256 Fornes, Maria Irene, 290 Fuentes, Carlos, 295 Gambaro, Griselda, 321 García, Lionel G., 333 González Martínez, Enrique, 346 Heredia, José María, 378 Icaza, Jorge, 405 Lins, Osman, 416 943

Genre Index Machado, Eduardo, 433 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, 438 Martí, José Julián, 450 Neruda, Pablo, 472 Ortiz Cofer, Judith, 487 Paz, Octavio, 499 Piñero, Miguel, 508 Puig, Manuel, 526 Queiroz, Rachel de, 533 Rechy, John, 545 Ruiz de Alarcón, Juan, 593 Sánchez, Florencio, 618 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 623 Usigli, Rodolfo, 666 Valdez, Luis Miguel, 673 Vallejo, César, 686 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 692 Vilalta, Maruxa, 700 Yglesias, Jose, 732 POETS Aguilera Malta, Demetrio, 1 Alegría, Ciro, 13 Alegría, Claribel, 20 Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel, 35 Alvarez, Julia, 40 Amado, Jorge, 48 Anaya, Rudolfo A., 56 Andrade, Mário de, 63 Arenas, Reinaldo, 68 Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 85 Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 99 Borges, Jorge Luis, 127 Burgos, Julia de, 146 Cardenal, Ernesto, 157 Carpentier, Alejo, 164 Casona, Alejandro, 172 Castillo, Ana, 183 Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 191 Cisneros, Sandra, 200 Corpi, Lucha, 212 Cortázar, Julio, 216 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la, 224 944

Cruz, Victor Hernández, 229 Darío, Rubén, 245 Donoso, José, 250 Dorfman, Ariel, 256 Drummond de Andrade, Carlos, 262 Espada, Martín, 269 Ferré, Rosario, 285 Galarza, Ernesto, 303 González Martínez, Enrique, 346 Guillén, Nicolás, 354 Heredia, José María, 378 Hernández, José, 382 Hinojosa, Rolando, 394 Lezama Lima, José, 409 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, 438 Martí, José Julián, 450 Mistral, Gabriela, 457 Neruda, Pablo, 472 Ortiz Cofer, Judith, 487 Parra, Nicanor, 494 Paz, Octavio, 499 Piñero, Miguel, 508 Reyes, Alfonso, 552 Ríos, Alberto, 558 Rivera, Tomás, 564 Roa Bastos, Augusto, 570 Romero, José Rubén, 587 Sarduy, Severo, 636 Soto, Gary, 642 Suárez, Virgil, 649 Taylor, Sheila Ortiz, 654 Usigli, Rodolfo, 666 Vallejo, César, 686 SHORT-STORY WRITERS Aguilera Malta, Demetrio, 1 Alegría, Ciro, 13 Alegría, Claribel, 20 Allende, Isabel, 27 Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel, 35 Anaya, Rudolfo A., 56 Andrade, Mário de, 63

Genre Index Arenas, Reinaldo, 68 Arlt, Roberto, 74 Arreola, Juan José, 79 Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 85 Azuela, Mariano, 93 Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 99 Barrios, Eduardo, 110 Bioy Casares, Adolfo, 114 Bombal, María Luisa, 120 Borges, Jorge Luis, 127 Brandão, Ignácio de Loyola, 136 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 150 Carpentier, Alejo, 164 Castillo, Ana, 183 Chávez, Denise, 195 Cisneros, Sandra, 200 Cortázar, Julio, 216 Darío, Rubén, 245 Donoso, José, 250 Dorfman, Ariel, 256 Drummond de Andrade, Carlos, 262 Ferré, Rosario, 285 Fuentes, Carlos, 295 Galeano, Eduardo, 309 Gallegos, Rómulo, 316 Gambaro, Griselda, 321 García, Lionel G., 333 García Márquez, Gabriel, 338 González Martínez, Enrique, 346 Guimarães Rosa, João, 361 Güiraldes, Ricardo, 368 Hudson, W. H., 400

Icaza, Jorge, 405 Lezama Lima, José, 409 Lins, Osman, 416 Lispector, Clarice, 426 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, 438 Mallea, Eduardo, 444 Mohr, Nicholasa, 463 Onetti, Juan Carlos, 480 Ortiz Cofer, Judith, 487 Ponce, Mary Helen, 514 Poniatowska, Elena, 519 Quiroga, Horacio, 538 Reyes, Alfonso, 552 Ríos, Alberto, 558 Rivera, Tomás, 564 Roa Bastos, Augusto, 570 Rodriguez, Abraham, Jr., 575 Romero, José Rubén, 587 Rulfo, Juan, 599 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 623 Sarduy, Severo, 636 Suárez, Virgil, 649 Thomas, Piri, 659 Valenzuela, Luisa, 681 Vallejo, César, 686 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 692 Vilalta, Maruxa, 700 Villarreal, José Antonio, 706 Villaseñor, Victor, 711 Viramontes, Helena María, 717 Yáñez, Agustín, 727 Yglesias, Jose, 732

945

Geographical Index ARGENTINA Arlt, Roberto, 74 Bioy Casares, Adolfo, 114 Borges, Jorge Luis, 127 Casona, Alejandro, 172 Cortázar, Julio, 216 Gambaro, Griselda, 321 Güiraldes, Ricardo, 368 Hernández, José, 382 Hudson, W. H., 400 Mallea, Eduardo, 444 Puig, Manuel, 526 Sábato, Ernesto, 606 Valenzuela, Luisa, 681 Wast, Hugo, 723 BRAZIL Amado, Jorge, 48 Andrade, Mário de, 63 Brandão, Ignácio de Loyola, 136 Cunha, Euclides da, 235 Drummond de Andrade, Carlos, 262 Guimarães Rosa, João, 361 Lins, Osman, 416 Lins do Rego, José, 421 Lispector, Clarice, 426 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, 438 Queiroz, Rachel de, 533 CHILE Aguirre, Isidora, 7 Alegría, Ciro, 13 Allende, Isabel, 27 Barrios, Eduardo, 110 Bombal, María Luisa, 120 Donoso, José, 250 Dorfman, Ariel, 256 Mistral, Gabriela, 457 946

Neruda, Pablo, 472 Parra, Nicanor, 494 COLOMBIA García Márquez, Gabriel, 338 CUBA Arenas, Reinaldo, 68 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 150 Carpentier, Alejo, 164 Fornes, Maria Irene, 290 García, Cristina, 327 Guillén, Nicolás, 354 Heredia, José María, 378 Lezama Lima, José, 409 Machado, Eduardo, 433 Martí, José, 450 Sarduy, Severo, 636 Suárez, Virgil, 649 DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Alvarez, Julia, 40 ECUADOR Aguilera Malta, Demetrio, 1 Icaza, Jorge, 405 EL SALVADOR Alegría, Claribel, 20 GUATEMALA Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 85 MEXICO Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel, 35 Arreola, Juan José, 79 Azuela, Mariano, 93 Brito, Aristeo, 141 Cisneros, Sandra, 200 Corpi, Lucha, 212

Geographical Index Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la, 224 Esquivel, Laura, 274 Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín, 280 Fuentes, Carlos, 295 Galarza, Ernesto, 303 González Martínez, Enrique, 346 Guzmán, Martín Luis, 372 Paz, Octavio, 499 Poniatowska, Elena, 519 Reyes, Alfonso, 552 Romero, José Rubén, 587 Ruiz de Alarcón, Juan, 593 Rulfo, Juan, 599 Sainz, Gustavo, 612 Usigli, Rodolfo, 666 Vilalta, Maruxa, 700 Yáñez, Agustín, 727

UNITED STATES— AFRICAN AMERICANS Cruz, Victor Hernández, 229

NICARAGUA Alegría, Claribel, 20 Cardenal, Ernesto, 157 Darío, Rubén, 245

UNITED STATES— DOMINICAN AMERICANS Alvarez, Julia, 40

PARAGUAY Roa Bastos, Augusto, 570 PERU Alegría, Ciro, 13 Castaneda, Carlos, 177 Vallejo, César, 686 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 692 PUERTO RICO Burgos, Julia de, 146 Colón, Jesús, 208 Cruz, Victor Hernández, 229 Ferré, Rosario, 285 Mohr, Nicholasa, 463 Ortiz Cofer, Judith, 487 Piñero, Miguel, 508 Rodriguez, Abraham, Jr., 575 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 623

UNITED STATES— CHILEAN AMERICANS Allende, Isabel, 27 Dorfman, Ariel, 256 UNITED STATES— CUBAN AMERICANS Arenas, Reinaldo, 68 Fornes, Maria Irene, 290 García, Cristina, 327 Hijuelos, Oscar, 387 Machado, Eduardo, 433 Suárez, Virgil, 649 Yglesias, Jose, 732

UNITED STATES— MEXICAN AMERICANS Anaya, Rudolfo, 56 Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 99 Barrio, Raymond, 106 Brito, Aristeo, 141 Castillo, Ana, 183 Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 191 Chávez, Denise, 195 Cisneros, Sandra, 200 Corpi, Lucha, 212 Galarza, Ernesto, 303 García, Lionel G., 333 Hinojosa, Rolando, 394 Morales, Alejandro, 467 Ponce, Mary Helen, 514 Rechy, John, 545 Ríos, Alberto, 558 Rivera, Tomás, 564 Rodriguez, Richard, 580 Soto, Gary, 642 947

Geographical Index Taylor, Sheila Ortiz, 654 Valdez, Luis Miguel, 673 Villarreal, José Antonio, 706 Villaseñor, Victor, 711 Viramontes, Helena María, 717 UNITED STATES— NATIVE AMERICANS Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 99 Cruz, Victor Hernández, 229 UNITED STATES— PERUVIAN AMERICANS Castaneda, Carlos, 177

Dante, Nicholas, 241 Espada, Martín, 269 Ferré, Rosario, 285 Mohr, Nicholasa, 463 Ortiz Cofer, Judith, 487 Piñero, Miguel, 508 Rodriguez, Abraham, Jr., 575 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 623 Thomas, Piri, 659 UNITED STATES— SPANISH AMERICANS Sanchez, Thomas, 629

UNITED STATES— PORTUGUESE AMERICANS Sanchez, Thomas, 629

URUGUAY Galeano, Eduardo, 309 Onetti, Juan Carlos, 480 Quiroga, Horacio, 538 Sánchez, Florencio, 618

UNITED STATES— PUERTO RICANS Colón, Jesús, 208 Cruz, Victor Hernández, 229

VENEZUELA Gallegos, Rómulo, 316

948

Personages Index Aguilera Malta, Demetrio, 1-6, 788 Aguirre, Isidora, 7-12, 747 Agustín, José, 614 Alarcón, Juan Ruiz de. See Ruiz de Alarcón, Juan Alberdi, Juan Bautista, 744 Alcayaga, Lucila Godoy. See Mistral, Gabriela Alegría, Ciro, 13-19, 781 Alegría, Claribel, 20-26, 823 Alencar, José de, 768 Algarín, Miguel, 509, 806 Allende, Isabel, 27-34 Allende, Salvador, 28, 258-259 Almeida, Manuel António de, 769 Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel, 3539, 772 Alurista, 800 Álvarez, Alejandro Rodríguez. See Casona, Alejandro Alvarez, Julia, 40-47, 813 Álvarez de Toledo, Fernando, 858 Amado, Jorge, 48-55, 795 Anaya, Rudolfo A., 56-62, 760, 839 Andrade, Carlos Drummond de. See Drummond de Andrade, Carlos Andrade, Mário de, 63-67, 264 Andrade, Oswald de, 264 Arana Castañeda, Carlos César. See Castaneda, Carlos Arau, Alfonso, 274 Arenas, Reinaldo, 68-73, 793, 797 Arguedas, Alcides, 780

Arguedas, José María, 780, 788, 794 Arias, Ron, 761 Arlt, Roberto, 74-78, 783 Arreola, Juan José, 79-84 Arriví, Francisco, 751 Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana, Juana Inés de. See Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la Assis, Joaquim Maria Machado de. See Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 85-92, 787, 864 Azevedo, Aluísio, 774 Azuela, Mariano, 93-98, 773, 779 Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 99-105, 810 Balzac, Honoré de, 772 Barreto, Lima, 776 Barrio, Raymond, 106-109, 759 Barrios, Eduardo, 110-113, 783 Basoalto, Neftalí Ricardo Reyes. See Neruda, Pablo Bastos, Augusto Roa. See Roa Bastos, Augusto Belli, Giaconda, 823 Bello, Andrés, 817 Bello, Carlos, 744 Benedetti, Mario, 823 Bennett, Michael, 243 Bianchi, Alberto, 744 Bioy Casares, Adolfo, 114-119 Blest Gana, Alberto, 771 Boal, Augusto, 754 Bodet, Jaime Torres, 783 Bolívar, Simón, 850 Bombal, María Luisa, 120-126, 783 949

Personages Index Bondy, Sebastián Salazar, 751 Borges, Jorge Luis, 85, 115, 127135, 219, 784, 820, 863 Brandão, Ignácio de Loyola, 136140 Brecht, Bertolt, 11, 747 Breton, André, 785 Brito, Aristeo, 141-145 Buenaventura, Enrique, 750, 753 Burgos, Julia de, 146-149 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 150156, 792 Cabrujas, José Ignacio, 750 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 227 Cambacérès, Eugenio, 773 Caminha, Adolfo, 774 Cantón, Wilberto, 747 Cardenal, Ernesto, 157-163, 822 Cardoso, Lúcio, 795 Carpentier, Alejo, 85, 164-171, 786, 864 Carrasquilla, Tomás, 776 Carrillo, Adolfo, 834 Casal, Lourdes, 809 Casares, Adolfo Bioy. See Bioy Casares, Adolfo Casinos-Asséns, Rafael, 130 Casona, Alejandro, 172-176 Castaneda, Carlos, 177-182 Castellanos, Rosario, 780, 822 Castillo, Ana, 183-190 Castro, Fidel, 359, 763 Cavalcanti, José Lins do Rego. See Lins do Rego, José Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 191-194, 800, 810 Chacón, Eusebio, 834 Chacón, Felipe, 834 Chalbaud, Román, 750 Chávez, César, 715 Chávez, Denise, 195-199 Chávez, Fray Angélico, 835

950

Cisneros, Sandra, 200-207, 761, 830, 840 Clavijo, Uva, 808 Cofer, Judith Ortiz. See Ortiz Cofer, Judith Colón, Jesús, 208-211 Columbus, Christopher, 856 Corpi, Lucha, 212-215 Cortázar, Julio, 187, 216-223, 784, 792, 864 Cortés, Hernán, 741 Covarrubias, Francisco, 744 Cruz, Ramón de la, 743 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la, 224228, 741, 816 Cruz, Victor Hernández, 229-234 Cunha, Euclides da, 235-240, 774 Dante, Nicholas, 241-244 Darío, Rubén, 245-249, 351-352, 773, 818, 862 Davis, B. Lynch. See Bioy Casares, Adolfo De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés. See Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la Denís, Julio. See Cortázar, Julio Díaz, Junot, 848 Díaz, Porfirio, 94, 374, 553, 730, 778 Díaz Rodríguez, Manuel, 777 Domecq, H. Bustos. See Bioy Casares, Adolfo; Borges, Jorge Luis Donoso, José, 250-255, 776, 791 Dorfman, Ariel, 256-261 Dorfman, Vladimiro. See Dorfman, Ariel Dragún, Osvaldo, 748 Drummond de Andrade, Carlos, 262-268 Duvalier, François “Papa Doc,” 750

Personages Index Echeverría, Esteban, 770 Ercilla y Zúñiga, Alonso de, 816 Escragnolle Tarmay, Alfredo de, 772 Espada, Martín, 269-273, 811 Esquivel, Laura, 274-279, 797 Esteves, Sandra María, 806-807 Estrada Cabrera, Manuel, 86 Felipe, Carlos, 751 Fernández, Macedonio, 785 Fernández, Roberto, 847 Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín, 280-284, 769 Ferré, Rosario, 285-289, 823 Figueroa, José Angel, 806 Filloy, Juan, 785 Fornes, Maria Irene, 290-294, 435 Forteza, Horacio Quiroga y. See Quiroga, Horacio Francia, José Gaspar Rodríguez, 743 Franco, Francisco, 3, 690, 734 Fuentes, Carlos, 81, 295-302, 769, 777, 790, 865 Fusco, Coco, 755 Gaitán, Jorge Eliécer, 340 Galarza, Ernesto, 303-308 Galeano, Eduardo, 309-315 Galich, Manuel, 751 Gallegos, Rómulo, 316-320, 781, 863 Gálvez, Manuel, 776 Gambaro, Griselda, 321-326, 749 Gamboa, Federico, 746, 773 García, Cristina, 327-332, 765 García, Lionel G., 333-337 García Lorca, Federico, 475 García Márquez, Gabriel, 276, 338-345, 697, 784, 794, 865 Gelman, Juan, 823 Giardinelli, Mempo, 796

Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 755 Gomez Piñero, Miguel Antonio. See Piñero, Miguel Gómez de Avellaneda, Gerturdis, 381, 744, 771, 817 Góngora y Argote, Luis de, 227, 556 Gonzales, Rodolfo, 804 González, Celedonio, 765 González, Genaro, 839 González, José Luis, 763, 845 González Martínez, Enrique, 346-353 Gorky, Maxim, 745 Guillén, Nicolás, 354-360 Guimarães, Bernardo, 769 Guimarães Rosa, João, 361-367, 431, 795 Güiraldes, Ricardo, 74, 368-371, 781, 863 Gusmão, Alexandre de, 768 Gutiérrez, Jorge Díaz, 748 Gutierrez Nájera, Manuel, 818 Guzmán, Martín Luis, 372-377, 779 Halmar, Augusto d’, 777 Harford, Henry. See Hudson, W. H. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 669 Heredia, José María, 378-381, 817 Hernández, Antonio Acevedo, 745 Hernández, José, 382-386, 817 Hernández Cruz, Victor. See Cruz, Victor Hernández Hernandez del Castillo, Ana. See Castillo, Ana Herrera y Reissig, Julio, 351 Hijuelos, Oscar, 387-393, 765 Hinojosa, Rolando, 394-399, 760 Hostos, Eugenio María de, 786 951

Personages Index Hudson, W. H., 400-404 Huidobro, Vicente, 782, 820 Ibañez, Sara de, 822 Ibarbourou, Juana de, 823 “Ibsen criollo, El” (nickname of Florencio Sánchez), 622 Icaza, Jorge, 405-408, 780 Infante, Guillermo Cabrera. See Cabrera Infante, Guillermo Isaacs, Jorge, 770, 775 Istarú, Ana, 823 Jarnés, Benjamín, 782 Javier, Francisco, 744 Joyce, James, 786 Kanellos, Nicolás, 801, 813 Kirkwood, James, 243 Kropotkin, Pyotr, 745 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 857 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 65 Levins Morales, Aurora, 811 Levinson, Luisa Mercedes, 863 Lezama Lima, José, 70, 409-415, 637, 793 Lima, José Lezama. See Lezama Lima, José Lins, Osman, 416-420 Lins do Rego, José, 421-425 Lispector, Clarice, 426-432, 795 Lizardi, José Joaquín Fernández de. See Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín Lizárraga, Andrés, 748 Llerena, Cristóbal de, 742 Llosa, Mario Vargas. See Vargas Llosa, Mario López y Fuentes, Gregorio, 779 Loveira, Carlos, 774 Loyola Brandão, Ignácio de. See Brandão, Ignácio de Loyola Luaces, Joaquín Lorenzo, 744 952

Lugones, Leopoldo, 351, 819 Lynch, B. Suárez. See Bioy Casares, Adolfo; Borges, Jorge Luis Machado, Eduardo, 433-437 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, 365, 438-443, 774, 860 Magdaleno, Mauricio, 781 Mallea, Eduardo, 444-449, 788 Malta, Demetrio Aguilera. See Aguilera Malta, Demetrio Marechal, Leopoldo, 785 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 15 Mármol, José, 770 Marqués, René, 752 Márquez, Gabriel García. See García Márquez, Gabriel Martí, José Julián, 352, 450-456, 743, 763, 818 Martínez, Dionisio D., 812 Martínez, Enrique González. See González Martínez, Enrique Martínez, Max, 840 Martínez, Rafael Arévalo, 777 Martínez Zuviría, Gustavo Adolfo. See Wast, Hugo Matto de Turner, Clorinda, 771 Mendoza, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón y. See Ruiz de Alarcón, Juan Mera, Juan León, 771 Meza, Ramón, 775 Miranda, Javier. See Bioy Casares, Adolfo Mistral, Gabriela, 457-462, 473, 821 Mohr, Nicholasa, 463-466, 763, 846 Mora, Pat, 810 Morales, Alejandro, 467-471 Morales, Conrad. See Dante, Nicholas Morales, Rosario, 811 Murillo, Rosario, 823

Personages Index Neruda, Pablo, 121, 458, 472479, 747, 821 Niggli, Josefina, 835 Oña, Pedro de, 780 O’Neill, Eugene, 753 Onetti, Juan Carlos, 480-486, 789 Orrego Luco, Luis, 776 Ortiz, Judith. See Ortiz Cofer, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Judith, 487-493, 811, 847 Ortiz Taylor, Sheila. See Taylor, Sheila Ortiz Paredes, Américo, 836 Parra, Nicanor, 494-498, 822 Pavlovsky, Eduardo, 750 Paz, Octavio, 499-507, 821 Pensador Mexicano, El. See Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín Pereira, Nuno Marques, 768 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 812 Peri Rossi, Cristina, 798 Petraglia, Jorge, 323 Pietri, Pedro, 806-807 Pimenta da Cunha, Euclides Rodrigues. See Cunha, Euclides da Piñero, Miguel, 508-513, 806 Pinochet Ugarte, Augusto, 254, 259, 342 Pizarnik, Alejandra, 823 Poe, Edgar Allan, 219, 538, 853 Pompéia, Raúl, 774 Ponce, Mary Helen, 514-518 Poniatowska, Elena, 519-525 Puig, Manuel, 526-532, 794, 797 Queiroz, Rachel de, 533-537 Quevado y Villegas, Francisco Gómez de, 227 Quiroga, Horacio, 538-544, 862

Rabasa, Emilio, 773 Ramón Jiménez, Juan, 410 Ramos, Graciliano, 784 Ramos, José Antonio, 745 Rechy, John, 545-551 Rego, José Lins do. See Lins do Rego, José Requena, María Asunción, 747 Reyes, Alfonso, 552-557 Reyles, Carlos, 777 Ríos, Alberto, 558-563 Rivera, José Eustacio, 781 Rivera, Tomás, 396, 564-569, 830, 838 Roa Bastos, Augusto, 570-574, 793 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 788 Rodó, José Enrique, 775 Rodrigues Pimenta da Cunha, Euclides. See Cunha, Euclides da Rodriguez, Abraham, Jr., 575579, 847 Rodriguez, Richard, 580-586 Rojas, Manuel, 783 Romero, Alberto, 809 Romero, Archbishop Oscar, 23 Romero, José Rubén, 587-592 Rosa, João Guimarães. See Guimarães Rosa, João Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 744, 770 Ruiz de Alarcón, Juan, 593-598 Rulfo, Juan, 81, 599-605, 779 Sábato, Ernesto, 606-611, 789 Sacasa, Juan Bautista, 21 Sacastra, Martin. See Bioy Casares, Adolfo Sainz, Gustavo, 81, 612-617, 796 Sánchez, Florencio, 618-622, 745 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 623-628 Sánchez, Ricardo, 804 Sanchez, Thomas, 629-635 953

Personages Index Santiago Baca, Jimmy. See Baca, Jimmy Santiago Sarduy, Severo, 636-641, 793 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 770, 860 Sarmiento, Félix Rubén García. See Darío, Rubén Sievking, Alejandro, 748 Silva, José Asunción, 352, 775 Silva e Orta, Teresa Margarida da, 768 Skármeta, Antonio, 796 Sontag, Susan, 292 Soto, Gary, 642-648, 810 Soto, Pedro Juan, 762, 845 Storni, Alfonsina, 819 Stroessner, Alfredo, 573 Suárez, Mario, 835 Suárez, Virgil, 649-653, 847 Tacón, Miguel de, 743 Tapia y Rivera, Alejandro, 744 Taylor, Sheila Ortiz, 654-658 Thomas, Piri, 659-665, 846 Traba, Marta, 796 Trambley, Estela Portillo, 840 Triana, José, 751 Trujillo Molina, Rafael Leonidas, 41, 750 Ulibarrí, Sabine Reyes, 839 Usigli, Rodolfo, 666-672, 746 Valdés Domínguez, Fermín, 452

954

Valdez, Luis Miguel, 673-680, 755 Valenzuela, Luisa, 681-685 Vallejo, César, 13, 686-691, 780, 821 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 692-699, 794, 865 Varona, Dora, 18 Vasconcelos, José, 786 Vásquez, Richard, 759 Vega, Ed, 846 Vega Carpio, Lope de, 227 Vela, Arqueles, 783 Vigil, Evangelina, 801 Vilalta, Maruxa, 700-705, 752 Villa, Pancho, 375 Villarreal, José Antonio, 706-710, 759 Villaseñor, Victor, 711-716 Villaverde, Cirilo, 770 Viramontes, Helena María, 717722, 843 Wast, Hugo, 723-726 Williams, Tennessee, 753 Wolff, Egon Raúl, 747 Yáñez, Agustín, 727-731 Yañez, José Donoso. See Donoso, José Yglesias, Jose, 732-736 Zapata Olivella, Manuel, 798 Zola, Émile, 772

Title Index Abdala (Martí), 451, 743 Abingdon Square (Fornes), 293 Adán Buenosayres (Marechal), 785 Água-mãe (Lins do Rego), 424 Agüero Sisters, The (García, Cristina), 330 Águila o sol? See Eagle or Sun? Águila y la serpiente, El. See Eagle and the Serpent, The “Al cumplir veinte años de exilio” (Clavijo), 808 Al filo del agua. See Edge of the Storm, The Al sol (Heredia), 381 Alabanza (Espada), 273 Alburquerque (Anaya), 59 All Green Shall Perish (Mallea), 447, 788 Alturas de Macchu Picchu. See Heights of Macchu Picchu, The Amadis of Gaul, 768 Amalia (Mármol), 770 Americas Review, The, 801, 828 Amor con amor se paga (Martí), 453 Amor en los tiempos del cólera, El. See Love in the Time of Cholera Amortajada, La. See Shrouded Woman, The Anaconda (Quiroga), 542 And Still the Earth (Brandão), 139 . . . and the earth did not part (Rivera), 564, 566, 838 Angel of Darkness, The (Sábato), 789 Apple in the Dark, The (Lispector), 428 Apuntes de un lugareño. See Notes of a Villager

Araucana, La (Ercilla y Zúñiga), 816 Arauco Tamed (Oña), 780, 859 Árbol de pólvora (Reyes), 556 Archipiélago de mujeres (Yáñez), 728 Ariel (Rodó), 775 Arturo, la estrella más brillante. See Arturo, the Most Brilliant Star Arturo, the Most Brilliant Star (Arenas), 72 Ashes of Izalco (Alegría, Claribel), 23 Así en la paz como en la guerra. See Writes of Passage Asleep in the Sun (Bioy Casares), 118 Astillero, El. See Shipyard, The Ateneu, O (Pompéia), 774 Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Vargas Llosa), 697 “Aunt Rosana’s Rocker” (Mohr), 847 Autumn of the Patriarch, The (García Márquez), 168, 342, 794 Avalovara (Lins), 418 Aventura de Miguel Littín, clandestino en Chile, La. See Clandestine in Chile ¡Ay vida, no me mereces! (Poniatowska), 522 Aztlán (anthology), 802 Azul (Darío), 246, 773, 862 Bahía de silencio, La. See Bay of Silence, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, The (Villaseñor), 713 Bamba, La (Valdez), 678 955

Title Index Bangüê (Lins do Rego), 423 Barca sin pescador, La. See Boat Without a Fisherman, The Barranca abajo. See Retrogression Barren Lives (Ramos), 784 Barrio Boy (Galarza), 304 Barrio on the Edge. See Old Faces and New Wine Baseball in April, and Other Stories (Soto), 647 Bay of Silence, The (Mallea), 446 Becky and Her Friends (Hinojosa), 398 Before We Were Free (Alvarez), 46 “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” (Cervantes), 192193 Beso de la mujer araña, El. See Kiss of the Spider Woman Bestiario (Cortázar), 219 Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (Puig), 527 Birds Without a Nest (Matto de Turner), 771 “Birthday” (Viramontes), 844 “Black Decade, The,” 69 Black Hair (Soto), 647 Black Heralds, The (Vallejo), 687 Black Mesa Poems (Baca), 102 Black Valley (Wast), 724-725 Blanco (Paz), 504 “Blanket Weaver” (Esteves), 807 Bless Me, Ultima (Anaya), 57, 60, 760 Blood of Requited Love (Puig), 529 Blow-Up, and Other Stories. See End of the Game, and Other Stories Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo (Esteves), 807 Boat Without a Fisherman, The (Casona), 174 Bodies and Souls (Rechy), 549 Body Snatcher (Onetti), 483 956

“Book of Genesis According to Saint Miguelito, The” (Piñero), 806 Book of Lamentations, The (Castellanos), 780 Boquitas pintadas. See Heartbreak Tango Born Guilty (Rojas), 783 Boy Without a Flag, The (Rodriguez, Abraham, Jr.), 577-578, 847 Breathing It In (Machado), 434 Brick People, The (Morales), 469 Brief Life, A (Onetti), 483 Broad and Alien Is the World (Alegría, Ciro), 16-17, 781 Broken Eggs (Machado), 435 “Broken English Dream, The” (Pietri), 807 Bronx Remembered, El (Mohr), 464-465, 846 Brother Ass (Barrios), 111-112 Brown (Rodriguez, Richard), 582, 584 Buenos Aires Affair, The (Puig), 529 Burning Patience (Skármeta), 796 Burning Plain, and Other Stories, The (Rulfo), 600 By Lingual Wholes (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 232 C.Z. (Canal Zone) (Aguilera Malta), 5 Caballeresa del sol, La. See Manuela, la caballeresa del sol Cacáu (Amado), 49 Café de nadie, El (Vela), 783 Calle Hoyt. See Hoyt Street Cambio de armas. See “Other Weapons” Cambio de piel. See Change of Skin, A

Title Index “Caminando por las calles de Manhattan” (Romero), 809 Caminho de pedras (Queiroz), 535 Camp, The (Gambaro), 749 Canaima (Gallegos), 318 Canción de nosotros, La (Galeano), 312 Cancionero sin nombre (Parra), 496 Canillita (Sánchez, Florencio), 618 Cantaclaro (Gallegos), 318 Cantando en el pozo. See Singing from the Well Cántico cósmico. See Music of the Spheres, The Canto. See Music of the Spheres, The Canto General (Neruda), 477 Cantos de vida y esperanza, los cisnes, y otros poemas (Darío), 247 Capirotada (Ríos), 562 Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (Vargas Llosa), 697 Caramelo (Cisneros), 203 Caras viejas y vino nuevo. See Old Faces and New Wine “Cariboo Café, The” (Viramontes), 843 Carolina Cuban (Pérez Firmat), 812 Casa de campo. See House in the Country, A Casa de los cuevos. See House of the Ravens, The Casa de los espíritus, La. See House of the Spirits, The Casa verde, La. See Green House, The Casualty Report (Vega), 846 Cecilia Valdés (Villaverde), 770 Celestino antes del alba. See Singing from the Well

Cenizas de Izalco. See Ashes of Izalco Century of the Wind (Galeano), 313-314 Change of Skin, A (Fuentes), 300 Changó, el gran putas (Zapata Olivella), 798 Chaves (Mallea), 446 Chicano (Vásquez), 759 China 1964 (Galeano), 311 Chorus Line, A (Dante), 241-242 Christmas in the Mountains (Altamirano), 38 Cien años de soledad. See One Hundred Years of Solitude City of Night (Rechy), 546, 548 Ciudad y los perros, La. See Time of the Hero, The Cla do jaboti (Andrade), 64 Clandestine in Chile (García Márquez), 342 Clara (Valenzuela), 683 Clemencia (Altamirano), 37 Clemente Chacón (Villarreal), 709 Cobra (Sarduy), 640 Colibrí (Sarduy), 640 Coming of the Night, The (Rechy), 550 Como agua para chocolate. See Like Water for Chocolate Compadre lobo (Sainz), 614 Conduct of Life, The (Fornes), 291, 293 Confabulary (Arreola), 80 Conquista de Mexico, La (Valdez), 675 Contrastes e confrontos (Cunha), 238 Conversation in the Cathedral (Vargas Llosa), 697 Cool Salsa (anthology), 802 Corbata celeste, La (Wast), 725 Corona de fuego (Usigli), 668 Corona de luz. See Crown of Light 957

Title Index Corona de sombra. See Crown of Shadows Coronation (Donoso), 251 Corpo de Baile (Guimarães Rosa), 363 Cosmic Canticle. See Music of the Spheres, The Cosmic Race, The (Vasconcelos), 786 “Creationist Manifesto” (Huidobro), 782 Crepusculario (Neruda), 475 “Crime of the Mathematics Professor, The” (Lispector), 430 Crisis (magazine), 312, 683 Crown of Light (Usigli), 668 Crown of Shadows (Usigli), 668 Crueldad por el honor, La (Ruiz de Alarcón), 596 Cruz en la Sierra Maestra, Una (Aguilera Malta), 5 Cuatro embajadores, Los (González, Celedonio), 765 Cueca larga, La (Parra), 496 Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte (Quiroga), 542 Cuentos de la selva para los niños. See South American Jungle Tales Cumandá (Mera), 771 “Curandera” (Mora), 810 Curfew (Donoso), 254 “Curriculum Cubense” (Sarduy), 638 Cutter, The (Suárez), 652 Danube, The (Fornes), 293 Daughter of Fortune (Allende), 32 Day of the Bees (Sanchez, Thomas), 634 Days and Nights of Love and War (Galeano), 312 Days of Obligation (Rodriguez, Richard), 582-583 958

De amor y de sombra. See Of Love and Shadows De donde son los cantantes. See From Cuba with a Song De noche vienes (Poniatowska), 522 De sobremesa (Silva), 775 Dear Diego (Poniatowska), 522523 “Death and the Compass” (Borges), 132 Death and the Maiden (Dorfman), 260 Death of Artemio Cruz, The (Fuentes), 300, 791 “Decapitated Chicken, The” (Quiroga), 540 “Declaración” (Clavijo), 808 Deep Rivers (Arguedas), 780 Del amor y otros demonios. See Of Love and Other Demons Delia’s Song (Corpi), 214 Depois do sol (Brandão), 137 “Desert Women” (Mora), 811 Desesperanza, La. See Curfew Deslinde, El (Reyes), 556 Desolación (Mistral), 458 Desterrados, Los. See Exiles, and Other Stories, The Devil in Texas, The (Brito), 142143 Devil to Pay in the Backlands, The (Guimarães Rosa), 361 Diablo en Texas, El. See Devil in Texas, The Diario de la guerra del cerdo. See Diary of the War of the Pig Diary of the War of the Pig (Bioy Casares), 116, 118 Días y noches de amor y de guerra. See Days and Nights of Love and War Discurso por Virgilio (Reyes), 556 Doidinho (Lins do Rego), 423

Title Index Dom Casmurro (Machado de Assis), 439 Domingo siete (Poniatowska), 522 Don Goyo (Aguilera Malta), 4-5, 788 Don Juan in New York City (Machado), 434 Don Quixote de la Mancha (Cervantes), 370, 768 Don Segundo Sombra (Güiraldes), 369-370, 781 Doña Bárbara (Gallegos), 318319, 781 Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (Amado), 52 Dona Flor e seus dois maridos. See Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands Dôra Doralina (Queiroz), 534, 536 Dormir al sol. See Asleep in the Sun Doubtful Straight, The (Cardenal), 162 Down the Ravine. See Retrogression Down These Mean Streets (Thomas), 662-663, 846 Dreaming in Cuban (García, Cristina), 329-330, 765 Drown (Díaz), 848 Duelo de caballeros (Alegría, Ciro), 18 Dueño de las estrellas, El (Ruiz de Alarcón), 596 Durante la reconquista (Blest Gana), 771 Eagle and the Serpent, The (Guzmán), 374, 376, 779 Eagle or Sun? (Paz), 504 ¡Ecué-Yamba-O! (Carpentier), 787 Edge of the Storm, The (Yáñez), 728, 730, 789 Elements of San Joaquin, The (Soto), 646

Empress of the Splendid Season (Hijuelos), 392 En el teocalli de Cholula (Heredia), 378 En las calles (Icaza), 406 En Nueva York y otras desgracias (Gonzáles, José Luis), 763 En una tempestad (Heredia), 378 End of the Game, and Other Stories (Cortázar), 219 “Ending Poem” (Morales and Levins Morales), 811 Enterrado vivo (Andrés), 764 “Entry of Christ in Havana, The” (Sarduy), 639 Epitaph of a Small Winner (Machado de Assis), 439 Escrito sobre un cuerpo. See Written on a Body España, aparta de mí este cáliz. See Spain, Take This Cup from Me España en el corazón. See Spain in the Heart Espesor del pellejo de un gato ya cadáver, El (González, Celedonio), 765 Esta noche juntos, amándonos tanto. See Together Tonight, Loving Each Other So Much Estampas del valle, y otras obras. See Sketches of the Valley, and Other Works Estrecho dudoso, El. See Doubtful Straight, The Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages (Puig), 529 Étranger, L’. See Stranger, The Eulogy for a Brown Angel. See Brown Eva Luna (Allende), 30 Exiles, and Other Stories, The (Quiroga), 542 Experiencia literaria, La (Reyes), 556 959

Title Index Explosion in a Cathedral (Carpentier), 169, 790 Expresión americana, La (Lezama Lima), 413 “Eyes of Zapata” (Cisneros), 841 Eyes on the Harem (Fornes), 292 Fabiola (Machado), 435 Face of an Angel (Chávez), 197198 Faces and Masks (Galeano), 313314 Facundo (Sarmiento), 770, 860 Family Ties (Lispector), 428, 430 Fantasmas aztecas (Sainz), 614 Far Away and Long Ago (Hudson), 403 Farewell to the Sea (Arenas), 71 Farm Workers and Agri-Business in California, 1947-1960 (Galarza), 306 Faultline (Taylor), 654, 656 Feast of the Goat, The (Vargas Llosa), 698 Fefu and Her Friends (Fornes), 292 Ficciones, 1935-1944 (Borges), 130, 132, 863 Fiel e a pedra, O (Lins), 417 Fiesta del Chivo. See Feast of the Goat, The Fiesta in November (Mallea), 446 Fifth Horseman, The (Villarreal), 708 Final Mist, The (Bombal), 121, 783 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 786 “First Dream” (Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la), 226 First Dream (Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la), 227, 816 Flamethrowers, The (Arlt), 76 Floating Island Plays, The (Machado), 435 960

Floating Islands. See Floating Island Plays, The Flor de durazno. See Peach Blossom Flor de juegos antiguos (Yáñez), 728 “Flor de Lis,” La (Poniatowska), 524 Floricanto Sí! (anthology), 802 Fogo morto (Lins do Rego), 424 For a New Novel (Robbe-Grillet), 788 Foreign Girl, The (Sánchez, Florencio), 620, 745 Foreign Legion, The (Lispector), 428 Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, The (Hijuelos), 390 Fourth Angel, The (Rechy), 549 Franco Years, The (Yglesias), 734 From Cuba with a Song (Sarduy), 638-639 Fuerte es el silencio (Poniatowska), 521 “Funes the Memorious” (Borges), 131 Futile Life of Pito Pérez, The (Romero), 588, 591 Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (Amado), 50 Gabriela, cravo e canela. See Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon Garabato Poems (Suárez), 653 Gato eficaz, El (Valenzuela), 683 Gaucho Martin Fierro, The (Hernández), 384 Gazapo (Sainz), 612, 615, 796 Genesis (Galeano), 313-314 Genio y figuras de Guadalajara (Yáñez), 728 Gesticulador, El (Usigli), 668, 746 Gestos (Sarduy), 638 Getting Home Alive (Morales and Levins Morales), 811

Title Index Glory of Don Ramiro, La (Larreta), 777 Golden Serpent, The (Alegría, Ciro), 15 Goodbye Land, The (Yglesias), 733 Gran señor y rajadiablos (Barrios), 111 Grande Sertão. See Devil to Pay in the Backlands, The Great Middle Class, The (Usigli), 670-671 Green House, The (Vargas Llosa), 697 Green Mansions (Hudson), 403 Gringa, La. See Foreign Girl, The Guaracha del Macho Camacho, La. See Macho Camacho’s Beat Guatemala (Galeano), 311 Guerra del fin del mundo, La. See War of the End of the World, The Guerra del tiempo. See War of Time Guerra sem testemunhas (Lins), 417 Habana para un infante difunto, La. See Infante’s Inferno Hallucinated City (Andrade), 64 Hallucinations (Arenas), 71 Hammon and the Beans, and Other Stories, The (Paredes), 836 “Happy Birthday” (Lispector), 430 Hardscrub (García, Lionel G.), 335 Harvest, The (Rivera), 838 Hasta no verte, Jesús mío. See Here’s to You, Jesusa! Hay que sonreír. See Clara Healing Earthquakes (Baca), 104 Heart of Aztlán (Anaya), 59 Heartbreak Tango (Puig), 529-530 Heights of Macchu Picchu, The (Neruda), 476

Heraldos negros, Los. See Black Heralds, The Herencia (Kanellos), 813 Here’s to You, Jesusa! (Poniatowska), 522 Hermano asno, El. See Brother Ass Hija de la fortuna. See Daughter of Fortune Hijo de hombre. See Son of Man Historia de Alejandro Mayta, La. See Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, The Historia de Él. See Story of Him, The “History of an Argentine Passion” (Mallea), 445 Hojarasca, La. See Leaf Storm Homage to the American Indians (Cardenal), 161 Hombres de maíz. See Men of Maize Homecoming (Alvarez), 45 Homenaje a los indios americanos. See Homage to the American Indians Hopscotch (Cortázar), 217, 221, 784, 792 Hora da estrela, A. See Hour of the Star, The Hour of the Star, The (Lispector), 429 House in the Country, A (Donoso), 251, 253 House of Mist, The. See Final Mist, The House of the Ravens, The (Wast), 725 House of the Spirits, The (Allende), 27, 31, 797 House on Mango Street, The (Cisneros), 200, 204, 761, 841 House on the Lagoon, The (Ferré), 286, 288 How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (Alvarez), 43-44 961

Title Index How to Read Donald Duck (Dorfman), 259 Hoyt Street (Ponce), 517 Huasipungo. See Villagers, The Human Poems (Vallejo), 688-689 Hunger of Memory (Rodriguez, Richard), 580, 582 I Am Joaquín (Gonzales), 804 “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!” (Valdez), 678 I the Supreme (Roa Bastos), 168, 573 Iguana Killer, The (Ríos), 559 Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando, The. See Hallucinations Imaginary Parents (Taylor), 654 Imagine the Angels of Bread (Espada), 271 Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero, The (Espada), 270 Importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos, La (Sánchez, Luis Rafael), 627 “In Exile” (Sánchez, Ricardo), 805 In Nueva York (Mohr), 465 In the Eye of the Hurricane (Machado), 435 In the Fist of the Revolution (Yglesias), 734 In the Time of the Butterflies (Alvarez), 45 Indio, El (López y Fuentes), 779 Infante’s Inferno (Cabrera Infante), 153 Infinite Plan, The (Allende), 30 Information for Foreigners (Gambaro), 750 Inframundo (Rulfo), 600 Innocencia (Escragnolle Tarmay), 772

962

Invention of Morel, The (Bioy Casares), 118 Invitation, The (Castillo), 184 Isla virgen, La (Aguilera Malta), 5 Island Like You, An (Ortiz Cofer), 847 Ismaelillo (Martí), 818 Itching Parrot, The (Fernández de Lizardi), 281-282, 769 Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, El (Borges), 130 Jicoténcal (Heredia), 381 Jolson Tonight (Dante), 243 Juan Criollo (Loveira), 774 Juntacadáveres. See Body Snatcher Jury (Villaseñor), 712 King Bongo (Sanchez, Thomas), 634 Kingdom of This World, The (Carpentier), 167, 789 Kiss of the Spider Woman (Puig), 529, 797 Klail City (Hinojosa), 397 Klail City Death Trip series (Hinojosa), 760 Korean Love Songs from Klail City Death Trip (Hinojosa), 394 Laberinto de la soledad, El. See Labyrinth of Solitude, The Labyrinth of Solitude, The (Paz), 503 Laços de família. See Family Ties Ladera este (Paz), 504 Lagar (Mistral), 461 Lanzallamas, Los (Arlt), 77 Last of the Menu Girls, The (Chávez), 197, 842 Latin Deli, The (Ortiz Cofer), 491, 811 Latin Women Pray (Ortiz Cofer), 488

Title Index Law of Love, The (Esquivel), 278 Lázaro (Alegría, Ciro), 18 Leaf Storm (García Márquez), 340 Lean Lands, The (Yáñez), 729 Leaving Home (García, Lionel G.), 335-336 Legião estrangeira, A. See Foreign Legion, The Ley del amor, La. See Law of Love, The “Leyenda del sombrerón” (Asturias), 89 Leyendas de Guatemala (Asturias), 88, 787 Liar, The (Corneille), 597 Libro de Manuel. See Manual for Manuel, A Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens, The (Rechy), 550 Like Water for Chocolate (Esquivel), 274, 276, 797 Lilus Kikus (Poniatowska), 522 Line of the Sun, The (Ortiz Cofer), 491 Lirismos (González Martínez), 349 “Listening to the Music of Arsenio Rodriguez Is Moving Closer to Knowledge” (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 231 “Little Miracles, Kept Promises” (Cisneros), 842 Living up the Street (Soto), 647 Llano en llamas, El. See Burning Plain, and Other Stories, The Loose Woman (Cisneros), 203 Los de abajo. See Underdogs, The Lost Steps, The (Carpentier), 167, 790 “Lost Year, The” (Rivera), 566 Love in the Time of Cholera (García Márquez), 342

“Lower East Side Poem, A” (Piñero), 806 Lucía Miranda (Wast), 725 Maçã no escuro, A. See Apple in the Dark, The Macho! (Villaseñor), 711, 714 Macho Camacho’s Beat (Sánchez, Luis Rafael), 625 Macunaíma (Andrade), 64, 66 Mad Toy (Arlt), 75 ¡Madrid! (Aguilera Malta), 5 Madrigal en ciudad (Gambaro), 322 Maestra normal, La (Gálvez), 776 Mainland (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 230 Maitreya (Sarduy), 640 Mala yerba. See Marcela Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas. See Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The (Hijuelos), 389, 391 Mangy Parrot, The. See Itching Parrot, The Manual for Manuel, A (Cortázar), 220 Manuela, la caballeresa del sol (Aguilera Malta), 5 Marcela (Azuela), 94 María (Isaacs), 770, 775 “Marlboro Man, The” (Cisneros), 842 Martín Rivas (Blest Gana), 772 Martirios del pueblo, Los (Bianchi), 744 Massacre in Mexico (Poniatowska), 521 Massacre of the Dreamers (Castillo), 188 “Matadero, El” (Echeverría), 770 Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen, A (Espada), 273 963

Title Index Medio tono. See Great Middle Class, The Memoirs of Pancho Villa (Guzmán), 376 Memoria del fuego. See Memory of Fire Memoria del fuego I. See Genesis Memoria del fuego II. See Faces and Masks Memoria del fuego III. See Century of the Wind Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas. See Epitaph of a Small Winner Memory of Fire (Galeano), 313314 Memory of Fire I. See Genesis Memory of Fire II. See Faces and Masks Memory of Fire III. See Century of the Wind Men of Maize (Asturias), 90, 787 Mendoza’s Dreams (Vega), 846 Menino de Engenho. See Plantation Boy Mentiroso, El. See Truth Suspected, The Mexican Village (Niggli), 835 M’hijo el dotor. See My Son, the Lawyer “Mi caballo mago” (Ullibarí), 839 “Mi Madre” (Mora), 810 ”Miami 1980” (Clavijo), 809 “Midnight Mass” (Machado de Assis), 440 Mile Zero (Sanchez, Thomas), 632-633 Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez, The (Rechy), 549 Mr. Ives’ Christmas (Hijuelos), 392 Mitío el empleado (Meza), 775 Mixquiahuala Letters, The (Castillo), 186 964

Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa, The (Machado), 435 Monkey Hunting (García, Cristina), 330 “More Room” (Ortiz Cofer), 491 Mothers and Shadows (Traba), 796 “Moths, The” (Viramontes), 843 Moths, and Other Stories, The (Viramontes), 718 Motivos de son (Guillén), 355-356 Mud (Fornes), 293 Muerte de Artemio Cruz, La. See Death of Artemio Cruz, The Muerte de Narciso (Lezama Lima), 410 Mujer del rio Sumpul, La. See Woman of the River Mummified Deer (Valdez), 678 Mundo alucinante, El. See Hallucinations Mundo es ancho y ajeno, El. See Broad and Alien Is the World Music in Cuba (Carpentier), 167 Music of the Spheres, The (Cardenal), 161-162 Música sentimental (Cambacérès), 773 My Son, the Lawyer (Sánchez, Florencio), 620 My Wicked, Wicked Ways (Cisneros), 202 Myriam la conspiradora (Wast), 725 Nacimientos, Los. See Genesis Nada como el piso 16. See Nothing Like the Sixteenth Floor Nada, nadie. See Nothing, Nobody Nada que ver (Gambaro), 323 Nada que ver con otra historia (Gambaro), 323 Não verás país nenhum. See And Still the Earth

Title Index Naturalist in La Plata, The (Hudson), 403 Navidad en las Montañas, La. See Christmas in the Mountains Near to the Wild Heart (Lispector), 427 New Mexico Triptych (Chávez, Fray Angélico), 835 New Voices of Hispanic America (Alegría, Claribel), 23 New York 1937 (Yglesias), 736 Next Year in Cuba (Pérez Firmat), 812 Nilda (Mohr), 465 9, El. See Number 9 Nine, Novena (Lins), 417 1910 (Vilalta), 703 Niño que enloqueció de amor, El (Barrios), 111 No Man’s Land (Onetti), 482 Noche de Tlatelolco, La. See Massacre in Mexico Noches tristes y día alegre (Fernández de Lizardi), 281 Nocturno europeo (Mallea), 445 Nosotros somos dios (Cantón), 747 Notes of a Villager (Romero), 590 Nothing Like the Sixteenth Floor (Vilalta), 701 Nothing, Nobody (Poniatowska), 522 Nove, novena. See Nine, Novena Novela que comienza, Una (Fernández), 785 Nuestra Natacha (Casona), 175 Nuevo mar para el rey, Un (Aguilera Malta), 5 Number 9 (Vilalta), 701 Numbers (Rechy), 547 Nuyorican Poetry (Algarín and Piñero), 806 Obscene Bird of Night, The (Donoso), 251, 792

Obsceno pájaro de la noche, El. See Obscene Bird of Night, The Obsesivos días circulares (Sainz), 614 Of Love and Other Demons (García Márquez), 342 Of Love and Shadows (Allende), 30 Old Faces and New Wine (Morales), 467 On Heroes and Tombs (Sábato), 608, 789 “On the Temple Pyramid of Cholula” (Heredia), 380 One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Márquez), 31, 339, 343, 784, 794 Only Sons (González, Genaro), 839 Op Oloop (Filloy), 785 Open Veins of Latin America, The (Galeano), 312 “Other Weapons” (Valenzuela), 684 Otoño del patriarca, El. See Autumn of the Patriarch, The Otra vez el mar. See Farewell to the Sea Otro Canto (Castillo), 184 Our House in the Last World (Hijuelos), 387, 765 Our Lady of Babylon (Rechy), 549 Outsider, The (Sábato), 608-609 Oxford Book of Women’s Writing in the United States, The (Viramontes), 717 Paixão segundo G. H., A. See Passion According to G. H., The Palabras cruzadas (Poniatowska), 519 Palace of the White Skunks, The (Arenas), 70

965

Title Index Palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas, El. See Palace of the White Skunks, The Paloma de vuelo popular, La (Guillén), 358 Pantaleón y las visitadoras. See Captain Pantoja and the Special Service Papo Got His Gun! and Other Poems (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 230 Para leer al Pato Donald. See How to Read Donald Duck Paradiso (Lezama Lima), 410, 412, 793 Pasión según Antígona Pérez, La. See Passion According to Antígona Pérez, The Pasos perdidos, Los. See Lost Steps, The Passion According to Antígona Pérez, The (Sánchez, Luis Rafael), 625 Passion According to G. H., The (Lispector), 428 Pata de zorra (Wast), 726 Paula (Allende), 32 Paulicéia desvairada. See Hallucinated City Peach Blossom (Wast), 724 Pedro Páramo (Rulfo), 600, 602, 779, 790 Pentagonía, The. See Farewell to the Sea; Palace of the White Skunks, The; Singing from the Well Pérgola de las flores, La (Aguirre), 8, 10 Periquillo sarniento, El. See Itching Parrot, The Perros hambrientos, Los (Alegría, Ciro), 16 Perto do coração selvagem. See Near to the Wild Heart

966

Piedra de sol. See Sun Stone “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (Borges), 131 Pig Cookies, and Other Stories (Ríos), 559 Pit, The (Onetti), 481 Plan infinito, El. See Infinite Plan, The Plantation Boy (Lins do Rego), 422-423 Plum Plum Pickers, The (Barrio), 107-108, 759 Población esperanza, La (Aguirre), 9 Pocho (Villarreal), 706, 708, 759 Poemas humanos. See Human Poems Poemas y antipoemas. See Poems and Antipoems Poems and Antipoems (Parra), 496497 Popol Vuh (Asturias), 787 Portrait in Sepia (Allende), 32 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce), 708, 712 Portrait sépia. See Portrait in Sepia Position of America, The (Reyes), 555 Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, The. See Epitaph of a Small Winner Pozo, El. See Pit, The “Preciousness” (Lispector), 430 Preludios (González Martínez), 349 Premios, Los. See Winners, The President, The (Asturias), 88, 789 Primeiras estórias. See Third Bank of the River, and Other Stories, The Primero sueño. See First Dream Primos, Los (González, Celedonio), 765

Title Index Princesa del palacio de hierro, La. See Princess of the Iron Palace, The Princess of the Iron Palace, The (Sainz), 614 “Prodigious Milligram, The” (Arreola), 82 Prosas profanas, and Other Poems (Darío), 247 Psalms of Struggle and Liberation, The (Cardenal), 161 Pueblo inocente, El (Romero), 591 Puerto Rican in New York, A (Colón), 209 Puerto Rican Obituary (Pietri), 807 Purén indómito (Álvarez de Toledo), 858 Purple Land, The (Hudson), 401402 “Purpose of Altar Boys, The” (Ríos), 561 Queen of the Prisons of Greece, The (Lins), 418 Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela. See Dear Diego Quijote de El Dorado, El (Aguilera Malta), 5 Quintuplets (Sánchez, Luis Rafael), 624, 626 Quinze, O (Queiroz), 535 Rabbit Boss (Sanchez, Thomas), 631 Rag Doll Plagues, The (Morales), 468-469 Rain of Gold (Villaseñor), 713 Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings (Trambley), 840 Rainha dos cárceres da Grécia, A. See Queen of the Prisons of Greece, The Rayuela. See Hopscotch

Raza de bronce (Arguedas), 780 Reaching for the Mainland (Ortiz Cofer), 488 Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, The (Vargas Llosa), 698 Reasons of State (Carpentier), 168, 793 Rebelión es el giro de manos del amante. See Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands Rebellion in the Backlands (Cunha), 236, 774 Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Espada), 271 Recuerdo (Ponce), 515 Recurso del método, El. See Reasons of State Red Beans (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 232 Región más transparente, La. See Where the Air Is Clear Reino de este mundo, El. See Kingdom of This World, The Related Retreats (Machado), 434 Residence on Earth, and Other Poems (Neruda), 475 Residencia en la tierra. See Residence on Earth, and Other Poems “Residue” (Drummond de Andrade), 266 Respuesta de la poetisa a la muy ilustre Sor Filotea de la Cruz (Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la), 227 Retrogression (Sánchez, Florencio), 621, 745 Revista Chicano-Riqueña (journal), 828 Revolución cubana, La (Alegría, Ciro), 18 Rhythm, Content, & Flavor (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 232 “River, The” (Soto), 645 967

Title Index Road to Tamazunchale, The (Arias), 761 Roman Catholic Church as a Factor in the Political and Social History of Mexico, The (Galarza), 305 Rosenda (Romero), 591 Sab (Gómez de Avellaneda), 771 Sacred Families (Donoso), 251 Sagarana (Guimarães Rosa), 362 Salmos. See Psalms of Struggle and Liberation, The Sangre de amor correspondido. See Blood of Requited Love Sangre patricia (Díaz Rodríguez), 777 Santa (Gamboa), 773 Santa Juana de América (Lizárraga), 749 Sapogonia (Castillo), 187 Sarita (Fornes), 293 “Search for Poetry” (Drummond de Andrade), 266 Senderos ocultos, Los (González Martínez), 349 Señor Presidente, El. See President, The Separate Reality, A (Castaneda), 179 Serpiente de oro, La. See Golden Serpent, The Sertões, Os. See Rebellion in the Backlands Seven Madmen, The (Arlt), 76-77, 783 Seven Serpents and Seven Moons (Aguilera Malta), 5, 788 Sexual Outlaw, The (Rechy), 549 Ship of Fools, The (Peri Rossi), 797 Shipyard, The (Onetti), 483 Short Eyes (Piñero), 508, 511 Shroud in the Family, A (García, Lionel G.), 335 968

Shrouded Woman, The (Bombal), 122 Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, The (Valdez), 674 Siamese Twins, The (Gambaro), 324 Siameses, Los. See Siamese Twins, The Siete locos, Los. See Seven Madmen, The Siete lunas y siete serpientes. See Seven Serpents and Seven Moons Siglo de las luces, El. See Explosion in a Cathedral Silence of the Llano, The (Anaya), 839 Silent Dancing (Ortiz Cofer), 490491 “Silvery Night, A” (Rivera), 566 Simple Habana Melody, A (Hijuelos), 392 Simple Verses (Martí), 452, 455 Singing from the Well (Arenas), 71 Sirena varada, La (Casona), 173 62: A Model Kit (Cortázar), 220 Sketches of the Valley, and Other Works (Hinojosa), 396 Small Faces (Soto), 646 Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, The (Ríos), 562 Snaps (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 230 So Far from God (Castillo), 186, 188 Sobre héroes y tumbas. See On Heroes and Tombs Sobre la misma tierra (Gallegos), 318 Sol, Al. See Al sol Sombra del caudillo, La (Guzmán), 376, 779 Son of Man (Roa Bastos), 571572, 793

Title Index “Son-Sequence” (Pérez Firmat), 812 Sóngoro cosongo (Guillén), 357 South American Jungle Tales (Quiroga), 542 Spain in the Heart (Neruda), 475 Spain, Take This Cup from Me (Vallejo), 688, 690 Spiders in the House and Workers in the Field (Galarza), 306 Spidertown (Rodriguez, Abraham, Jr.), 577 Spiks (Soto, Pedro Juan), 762, 845 Splendor and Death of Joaquin Murieta (Neruda), 747 Spring Forward/Fall Back (Taylor), 657 Stevie Wants to Play the Blues (Machado), 434 Stories from El Barrio (Thomas), 846 Story of Him, The (Vilalta), 701 Stranger, The (Camus), 447 Strangers in Our Fields (Galarza), 306 Subterrâneos da liberdade, Os (Amado), 50 Sultry Moon (Giardinelli), 796 Sumiço da santa, O. See War of the Saints, The Summer Life, A (Soto), 645 Sun Stone (Paz), 503 Sunburst (Magdaleno), 781 Suor (Amado), 49 Suprema ley (Gamboa), 773 Sur (magazine), 121 Swift as Desire (Esquivel), 278 “Switchman, The” (Arreola), 81 Tacámbaro (Romero), 590 Taking Control (Ponce), 515 Tala (Mistral), 460 Tale of Sunlight, The (Soto), 647

“Tales Told Under the Mango Tree” (Ortiz Cofer), 491 Taller (magazine), 503 Tan veloz como el deseo. See Swift as Desire Teachings of Don Juan, The (Castaneda), 178, 180 Tembladera (Ramos), 745 Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses (Ríos), 559 Terms of Survival (Ortiz Cofer), 490 Ternura (Mistral), 458 Terra nostra (Fuentes), 298, 300, 777, 790 Theatre of the Oppressed, The (Boal), 754 “Thin Edge of Happiness, The” (Guimarães Rosa), 364 Third Bank of the River, and Other Stories, The (Guimarães Rosa), 363 This Day’s Death (Rechy), 549 Three Marias, The (Queiroz), 536 Three Trapped Tigers (Cabrera Infante), 152, 154, 792 Tía Julia y el escribidor, La. See Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter Tierra Amarilla (Ulibarrí), 839 Tierra de nadie. See No Man’s Land Tierra prodiga, La (Yáñez), 729 Tierras flacas, Las. See Lean Lands, The Tiêta do Agreste. See Tieta, the Goat Girl Tieta, the Goat Girl (Amado), 52 Time of the Hero, The (Vargas Llosa), 695-696 “To Julia de Burgos” (Burgos), 148 “To Roosevelt” (Darío), 248 Todo empezo el domingo (Poniatowska), 520 969

Title Index Todo verdor perecerá. See All Green Shall Perish Together Tonight, Loving Each Other So Much (Vilalta), 701 Tonight. See No Man’s Land “Tony Went to the Bodega but He Didn’t Buy Anything” (Espada), 272 Tortuga (Anaya), 59 Tragedy at Chular (Galarza), 307 Traición de Rita Hayworth, La. See Betrayed by Rita Hayworth “Tree, The” (Bombal), 123-124 Três Marias, As. See Three Marias, The Tres novelitas burguesas. See Sacred Families Tres tristes tigres. See Three Trapped Tigers Trials of a Respectable Family, The (Azuela), 96 Tribulaciones de una familia decente, Las. See Trials of a Respectable Family, The Trilce (Vallejo), 687 Tropicalization (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 232 Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction (Espada), 270 Truth About Them, The (Yglesias), 735 Truth Suspected, The (Ruiz de Alarcón), 597 Túnel, El. See Outsider, The Tungsten (Vallejo), 780 Tunnel, The. See Outsider, The Tupac Amaru (Dragún), 748 Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Neruda), 475-476 Última niebla, La. See Final Mist, The Under the Feet of Jesus (Viramontes), 719-720 970

Underdogs, The (Azuela), 93, 376, 778 Uno y el universo (Sábato), 608 Valle negro. See Black Valley Varia invención. See Various Inventions Various Inventions (Arreola), 80 Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada. See Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair Venas abiertas de América Latina, Las. See Open Veins of Latin America, The Vendidos, Los (Valdez), 675 Verdad sospechosa, La. See Truth Suspected, The Versos de salón (Parra), 496 Versos libres (Martí), 455 Versos sencillos. See Simple Verses Vida breve, La. See Brief Life, A Vida inútil de Pito Pérez, La. See Futile Life of Pito Pérez, The Villagers, The (Icaza), 406, 780 Vision of Anáhuac (Reyes), 555556 Visitante, O (Lins), 416 Vivir (Barrios), 111 Vortex, The (Rivera, José Eustacio), 781 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 324 Wake in Ybor City, A (Yglesias), 733, 735 Walking Stars (Villaseñor), 716 War of the End of the World, The (Vargas Llosa), 239 War of the Saints, The (Amado), 53 War of Time (Carpentier), 169, 864 “Waxen Woman” (Sarduy), 638 Wedding, The (Ponce), 516-517

Title Index “Welcome, Bob” (Onetti), 484 West Indies, Ltd. (Guillén), 357 Where Sparrows Work Hard (Soto), 647 Where the Air Is Clear (Fuentes), 299, 790 Whispering to Fool the Wind (Ríos), 558 Wild Steps of Heaven (Villaseñor), 715 Winners, The (Cortázar), 219 “Woman Hollering Creek” (Cisneros), 842 Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories (Cisneros), 203, 841 Woman of Her Word (Vigil), 801 Woman of the River (Alegría, Claribel), 24 “Wring the Swan’s Neck” (González Martínez), 351

Writes of Passage (Cabrera Infante), 152 Written on a Body (Sarduy), 638 . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra. See . . . and the earth did not part Yawar fiesta (Arguedas), 788 Yo, el Supremo. See I the Supreme “Youngest Doll, The” (Ferré), 288 Zarco, the Bandit, El (Altamirano), 36-37, 772 Zero (Brandão), 136, 138 Zia Summer (Anaya), 59 Zona de carga y descarga (Ferré), 286 Zoot Suit (Valdez), 676-677 Zoot Suit Murders (Sanchez, Thomas), 632

971

Subject Index “A Roosevelt.” See “To Roosevelt” Abdala (Martí), 451, 743 Abingdon Square (Fornes), 293 Absurdism, 749 Actos, 674 Adán Buenosayres (Marechal), 785 Affirmative action, 582 African Americans. See Geographical Index under United States Afro-Cuban movement, 167, 231, 355, 637 Afro-Hispanic literature, 798 Água-mãe (Lins do Rego), 424 Agüero Sisters, The (García, Cristina), 330 Águila o sol? See Eagle or Sun? Águila y la serpiente, El. See Eagle and the Serpent, The Aguilera Malta, Demetrio, 1-6, 788 Aguirre, Isidora, 7-12, 747 Agustín, José, 614 AIDS, authors with; Reinaldo Arenas, 69; Nicholas Dante, 244; Severo Sarduy, 637 “Al cumplir veinte años de exilio” (Clavijo), 808 Al filo del agua. See Edge of the Storm, The Al sol (Heredia), 381 Alabanza (Espada), 273 Alarcón, Juan Ruiz de. See Ruiz de Alarcón, Juan Alberdi, Juan Bautista, 744 Alburquerque (Anaya), 59 Alcayaga, Lucila Godoy. See Mistral, Gabriela Alegría, Ciro, 13-19, 781 972

Alegría, Claribel, 20-26, 823 Alencar, José de, 768 Algarín, Miguel, 509, 806 Alhambra Theatre of Havana, 752 All Green Shall Perish (Mallea), 447, 788 Allende, Isabel, 27-34 Allende, Salvador, 28, 258-259 Almeida, Manuel António de, 769 Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel, 3539, 772 Alturas de Macchu Picchu. See Heights of Macchu Picchu, The Alurista, 800 Álvarez, Alejandro Rodríguez. See Casona, Alejandro Alvarez, Julia, 40-47, 813 Álvarez de Toledo, Fernando, 858 Amadis of Gaul, 768 Amado, Jorge, 48-55, 795 Amalia (Mármol), 770 American Book Award winners; Jimmy Santiago Baca, 104; Ana Castillo, 184; Sandra Cisneros, 202; Martín Espada, 271; Abraham Rodriguez, Jr., 579; Gary Soto, 647 American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), 15-16 Americas Review, The, 801, 828 Amor con amor se paga (Martí), 453 Amor en los tiempos del cólera, El. See Love in the Time of Cholera Amortajada, La. See Shrouded Woman, The Anaconda (Quiroga), 542

Subject Index Anaya, Rudolfo A., 56-62, 760, 839 And Still the Earth (Brandão), 139 . . . and the earth did not part (Rivera), 564, 566, 838 Andrade, Carlos Drummond de. See Drummond de Andrade, Carlos Andrade, Mário de, 63-67, 264 Andrade, Oswald de, 264 Angel of Darkness, The (Sábato), 789 Anthologies of Latino literature, 802, 855 Antipoetry, 494, 496 Apple in the Dark, The (Lispector), 428 Apuntes de un lugareño. See Notes of a Villager Arana Castañeda, Carlos César. See Castaneda, Carlos Arau, Alfonso, 274 Araucana, La (Ercilla y Zúñiga), 816 Arauco Tamed (Oña), 780, 859 Árbol de pólvora (Reyes), 556 Archipiélago de mujeres (Yáñez), 728 Arenas, Reinaldo, 68-73, 793, 797 Argentina. See Geographical Index Argentine Society of Writers Prize winners; Adolfo Bioy Casares, 118; Jorge Luis Borges, 131 Argentine theater, 743 Arguedas, Alcides, 780 Arguedas, José María, 780, 788, 794 Arias, Ron, 761 Ariel (Rodó), 775 Arlt, Roberto, 74-78, 783 Arreola, Juan José, 79-84

Arriví, Francisco, 751 Arte Público Press, 801, 828 Arturo, la estrella más brillante. See Arturo, the Most Brilliant Star Arturo, the Most Brilliant Star (Arenas), 72 Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana, Juana Inés de. See Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la Ashes of Izalco (Alegría, Claribel), 23 Así en la paz como en la guerra. See Writes of Passage Asleep in the Sun (Bioy Casares), 118 Assis, Joaquim Maria Machado de. See Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria Astillero, El. See Shipyard, The Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 85-92, 787, 864 Ateneu, O (Pompéia), 774 Ateno de la Juventud, El, 374, 554, 725 Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Vargas Llosa), 697 “Aunt Rosana’s Rocker” (Mohr), 847 Autobiography, 193, 518 Autumn of the Patriarch, The (García Márquez), 168, 342, 794 Avalovara (Lins), 418 Aventura de Miguel Littín, clandestino en Chile, La. See Clandestine in Chile ¡Ay vida, no me mereces! (Poniatowska), 522 Azevedo, Aluísio, 774 Aztec theater, 740 Aztlán (anthology), 802 Azuela, Mariano, 93-98, 773, 779 Azul (Darío), 246, 773, 862

973

Subject Index Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 99-105, 810 Bahia (Brazil), 52 Bahía de silencio, La. See Bay of Silence, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, The (Villaseñor), 713 Balzac, Honoré de, 772 Bamba, La (Valdez), 678 Bandera de Provincias, 727 Bangüê (Lins do Rego), 423 Barca sin pescador, La. See Boat Without a Fisherman, The Baroque poetry; Latin American, 816 Barranca abajo. See Retrogression Barren Lives (Ramos), 784 Barreto, Lima, 776 Barrio Boy (Galarza), 304 Barrio on the Edge. See Old Faces and New Wine Barrio, Raymond, 106-109, 759 Barrios, Eduardo, 110-113, 783 Baseball in April, and Other Stories (Soto), 647 Basoalto, Neftalí Ricardo Reyes. See Neruda, Pablo Bastos, Augusto Roa. See Roa Bastos, Augusto Bay of Silence, The (Mallea), 446 Beat poetry, 510 Becky and Her Friends (Hinojosa), 398 Before We Were Free (Alvarez), 46 Belli, Giaconda, 823 Bello, Andrés, 817 Bello, Carlos, 744 “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” (Cervantes), 192193 Benedetti, Mario, 823 Bennett, Michael, 243 Beso de la mujer araña, El. See Kiss of the Spider Woman 974

Bestiario (Cortázar), 219 Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (Puig), 527 Bianchi, Alberto, 744 Biblioteca Breve Prize, 153 Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 802 Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe, The, 801 Bilingualism (Spanish-English), 830. See also Code-switching; Spanglish Bioy Casares, Adolfo, 114-119 Birds Without a Nest (Matto de Turner), 771 “Birthday” (Viramontes), 844 “Black Decade, The,” 69 Black Hair (Soto), 647 Black Heralds, The (Vallejo), 687 Black Mesa Poems (Baca), 102 Black Valley (Wast), 724-725 Blanco (Paz), 504 “Blanket Weaver” (Esteves), 807 Bless Me, Ultima (Anaya), 57, 60, 760 Blest Gana, Alberto, 771 Blood of Requited Love (Puig), 529 Blow-Up, and Other Stories. See End of the Game, and Other Stories Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo (Esteves), 807 Boal, Augusto, 754 Boat Without a Fisherman, The (Casona), 174 Bodet, Jaime Torres, 783 Bodies and Souls (Rechy), 549 Body Snatcher (Onetti), 483 Bolívar, Simón, 850 Bombal, María Luisa, 120-126, 783 Bondy, Sebastián Salazar, 751

Subject Index “Book of Genesis According to Saint Miguelito, The” (Piñero), 806 Book of Lamentations, The (Castellanos), 780 Boom generation, 23, 254, 296, 365, 419, 573, 599, 636, 693, 791 Boquitas pintadas. See Heartbreak Tango Border Patrol, 142 Borges, Jorge Luis, 85, 115, 127135, 219, 784, 820, 863 Born Guilty (Rojas), 783 Boy Without a Flag, The (Rodriguez, Abraham, Jr.), 577-578, 847 Bracero program (1942-1964), 306 Brandão, Ignácio de Loyola, 136140 Brazil. See Geographical Index Brazilian Academy of Letters, 267; Jorge Amado, 52; Euclides da Cunha, 238; João Guimarães Rosa, 364; Joaquim Machado de Assis, 439; Rachel de Queiroz, 534 Brazilian long fiction, 768 Brazilian Modernism, 63, 66, 263, 534, 784 Brazilian Northeastern school. See Brazilian Modernism Breathing It In (Machado), 434 Brecht, Bertolt, 11, 747 Breton, André, 785 Brick People, The (Morales), 469 Brief Life, A (Onetti), 483 Brito, Aristeo, 141-145 Broad and Alien Is the World (Alegría, Ciro), 16-17, 781 Broken Eggs (Machado), 435 “Broken English Dream, The” (Pietri), 807

Bronx Remembered, El (Mohr), 464-465, 846 Brother Ass (Barrios), 111-112 Brown (Rodriguez, Richard), 582, 584 Buenaventura, Enrique, 750, 753 Buenos Aires, 76, 446 Buenos Aires Affair, The (Puig), 529 Burgos, Julia de, 146-149 Burning Patience (Skármeta), 796 Burning Plain, and Other Stories, The (Rulfo), 600 By Lingual Wholes (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 232 C.Z. (Canal Zone) (Aguilera Malta), 5 Caballeresa del sol, La. See Manuela, la caballeresa del sol Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 150156, 792 Cabrujas, José Ignacio, 750 Cacáu (Amado), 49 Café de nadie, El (Vela), 783 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 227 California, 107-108, 214, 304, 469, 643, 654 Calle Hoyt. See Hoyt Street Cambacérès, Eugenio, 773 Cambio de armas. See “Other Weapons” Cambio de piel. See Change of Skin, A “Caminando por las calles de Manhattan” (Romero), 809 Caminha, Adolfo, 774 Caminho de pedras (Queiroz), 535 Camp, The (Gambaro), 749 Canaima (Gallegos), 318 Canción de nosotros, La (Galeano), 312 Cancionero sin nombre (Parra), 496 975

Subject Index Canillita (Sánchez, Florencio), 618 Cantaclaro (Gallegos), 318 Cantando en el pozo. See Singing from the Well Cántico cósmico. See Music of the Spheres, The Canto. See Music of the Spheres, The Canto General (Neruda), 477 Cantón, Wilberto, 747 Cantos de vida y esperanza, los cisnes, y otros poemas (Darío), 247-248 Capirotada (Ríos), 562 Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (Vargas Llosa), 697 Caramelo (Cisneros), 203 Caras viejas y vino nuevo. See Old Faces and New Wine Cardenal, Ernesto, 157-163, 822 Cardoso, Lúcio, 795 “Cariboo Café, The” (Viramontes), 843 Carolina Cuban (Pérez Firmat), 812 Carpentier, Alejo, 85, 164-171, 786, 864 Carrasquilla, Tomás, 776 Carrillo, Adolfo, 834 Casa de campo. See House in the Country, A Casa de las Américas Prize winners; Claribel Alegría, 23; Eduardo Galeano, 312; Rolando Hinojosa, 397 Casa de los cuevos. See House of the Ravens, The Casa de los espíritus, La. See House of the Spirits, The Casa verde, La. See Green House, The Casal, Lourdes, 809

976

Casares, Adolfo Bioy. See Bioy Casares, Adolfo Casinos-Asséns, Rafael, 130 Casona, Alejandro, 172-176 Castaneda, Carlos, 177-182 Castellanos, Rosario, 780, 822 Castillo, Ana, 183-190 Castro, Fidel, 359, 763. See also Cuban Revolution (19561959) Casualty Report (Vega), 846 Catholic influence, 831 Catholicism, 59, 110, 159, 227, 410, 581, 730 Caudillo system, 790 Cavalcanti, José Lins do Rego. See Lins do Rego, José Cecilia Valdés (Villaverde), 770 Celestino antes del alba. See Singing from the Well Cenizas de Izalco. See Ashes of Izalco Censorship; Claribel Alegría, 23; Jorge Amado, 49; Reinaldo Arenas, 70; Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, 137; Guillermo Cabrera Infante, 151; José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, 283; Rómulo Gallegos, 316; José Martí, 451; Manuel Puig, 527; Ernesto Sábato, 608; Piri Thomas, 662663; Luisa Valenzuela, 684; Mario Vargas Llosa, 697 Centro Campesino Cultural, El, 675 Centro de Experimentación audiovisual del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, 323 Century of the Wind (Galeano), 313-314 Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 191-194, 800, 810

Subject Index Cervantes Prize winners; Guillermo Cabrera Infante, 155; Alejo Carpentier, 170; Juan Carlos Onetti, 485; Augusto Roa Bastos, 574; Juan Rulfo, 600 Chaco War (1932-1935), 571 Chacón, Eusebio, 834 Chacón, Felipe, 834 Chalbaud, Román, 750 Change of Skin, A (Fuentes), 300 Changó, el gran putas (Zapata Olivella), 798 Chaves (Mallea), 446 Chávez, César, 715 Chávez, Denise, 195-199 Chávez, Fray Angélico, 835 Chicano (Vásquez), 759 Chicano movement, 59, 106, 108, 144, 183, 186, 191, 304, 469, 514, 548, 565-566, 584, 654, 674, 676, 706, 715, 717, 837; drama, 755; long fiction, 758 Chicano poetry, 804 Chile. See Geographical Index Chilean Americans. See Geographical Index under United States Chilean theater, 745 China 1964 (Galeano), 311 Chinese population in Cuba, 640 Chorus Line, A (Dante), 241-242 Choteo tradition, 154 Christmas in the Mountains (Altamirano), 38 Cien años de soledad. See One Hundred Years of Solitude Cisneros, Sandra, 200-207, 761, 830, 840 City of Night (Rechy), 546, 548 Ciudad y los perros, La. See Time of the Hero, The Cla do jaboti (Andrade), 64

Clandestine in Chile (García Márquez), 342 Clara (Valenzuela), 683 Clavijo, Uva, 808 Clemencia (Altamirano), 37 Clemente Chacón (Villarreal), 709 Cobra (Sarduy), 640 Code-switching, 831, 845. See also Bilingualism; Spanglish Cofer, Judith Ortiz. See Ortiz Cofer, Judith Colibrí (Sarduy), 640 Colombia. See Geographical Index Colón, Jesús, 208-211 Colonial era, 740, 855 Colonial theater in Mexico, 742 Colonialism; in Itching Parrot, The (Fernández de Lizardi), 282; in Terra nostra (Fuentes), 298 Columbus, Christopher, 856 Comedia musical, 752 Coming of the Night, The (Rechy), 550 Communists, authors as; Jorge Amado, 49; Carlos Drummond de Andrade, 265; Eduardo Galeano, 311; Nicolás Guillén, 358; Pablo Neruda, 475; Rachel de Queiroz, 534; César Vallejo, 689 Como agua para chocolate. See Like Water for Chocolate Compadre lobo (Sainz), 614 Conduct of Life, The (Fornes), 291, 293 Confabulary (Arreola), 80 Conquista de Mexico, La (Valdez), 675 Contrastes e confrontos (Cunha), 238

977

Subject Index Conversation in the Cathedral (Vargas Llosa), 697 Convicts, authors as; Jimmy Santiago Baca, 100; Miguel Piñero, 508; Piri Thomas, 661 Cool Salsa (anthology), 802 Corbata celeste, La (Wast), 725 Corona de fuego (Usigli), 668 Corona de luz. See Crown of Light Corona de sombra. See Crown of Shadows Coronation (Donoso), 251 Corpi, Lucha, 212-215 Corpo de Baile (Guimarães Rosa), 363 Corridos, 678, 834 Cortázar, Julio, 187, 216-223, 784, 792, 864 Cortés, Hernán, 741 Cosmic Canticle. See Music of the Spheres, The Cosmic Race, The (Vasconcelos), 786 Cosmopolitismo, 784 Costumbrismo, 702, 744, 773, 775, 859 Covarrubias, Francisco, 744 Creacionismo, 820 “Creationist Manifesto” (Huidobro), 782 Crepusculario (Neruda), 475 “Crime of the Mathematics Professor, The” (Lispector), 430 Criollismo, 773 Crisis (magazine), 312, 683 Cronistas, 834 Crown of Light (Usigli), 668 Crown of Shadows (Usigli), 668 Crueldad por el honor, La (Ruiz de Alarcón), 596 Cruz, Ramón de la, 743 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la, 224228, 741, 816 978

Cruz, Victor Hernández, 229-234 Cruz en la Sierra Maestra, Una (Aguilera Malta), 5 Cuadros de costumbres, 859 Cuatro embajadores, Los (González, Celedonio), 765 Cuauhtemoc, the Last Aztec Emperor (Gómez de Avellaneda), 771 Cuba. See Geographical Index Cuban American poetry, 803, 808 Cuban Americans. See Geographical Index under United States Cuban independence from Spain, 450 Cuban long fiction, 763 Cuban Revolution (1956-1959), 18, 69, 72, 152, 327, 358, 637, 652, 734, 763 Cuban theater, 743 Cuban War of Independence, 743 Cueca larga, La (Parra), 496 Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte (Quiroga), 542 Cuentos de la selva para los niños. See South American Jungle Tales Cumandá (Mera), 771 Cunha, Euclides da, 235-240, 774 “Curandera” (Mora), 810 Curanderismo, 57, 60 Curfew (Donoso), 254 “Curriculum Cubense” (Sarduy), 638 Cutter, The (Suárez), 652 Dante, Nicholas, 241-244 Danube, The (Fornes), 293 Darío, Rubén, 245-249, 351-352, 773, 818, 862 Daughter of Fortune (Allende), 32

Subject Index Davis, B. Lynch. See Bioy Casares, Adolfo Day of the Bees (Sanchez, Thomas), 634 Days and Nights of Love and War (Galeano), 312 Days of Obligation (Rodriguez, Richard), 582-583 De amor y de sombra. See Of Love and Shadows De donde son los cantantes. See From Cuba with a Song De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés. See Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la De noche vienes (Poniatowska), 522 De sobremesa (Silva), 775 Dear Diego (Poniatowska), 522523 “Death and the Compass” (Borges), 132 Death and the Maiden (Dorfman), 260 Death of Artemio Cruz, The (Fuentes), 300, 791 “Decapitated Chicken, The” (Quiroga), 540 “Declaración” (Clavijo), 808 Deep Rivers (Arguedas), 780 Del amor y otros demonios. See Of Love and Other Demons Delia’s Song (Corpi), 214 Denís, Julio. See Cortázar, Julio Depois do sol (Brandão), 137 “Desert Women” (Mora), 811 Desesperanza, La. See Curfew Deslinde, El (Reyes), 556 Desolación (Mistral), 458 Desterrados, Los. See Exiles, and Other Stories, The Devil in Texas, The (Brito), 142143 Devil to Pay in the Backlands, The (Guimarães Rosa), 361

Diablo en Texas, El. See Devil in Texas, The Diario de la guerra del cerdo. See Diary of the War of the Pig Diary of the War of the Pig (Bioy Casares), 116, 118 Días y noches de amor y de guerra. See Days and Nights of Love and War Díaz, Junot, 848 Díaz, Porfirio, 94, 374, 553, 730, 778 Díaz Rodríguez, Manuel, 777 Discurso por Virgilio (Reyes), 556 Doidinho (Lins do Rego), 423 Dom Casmurro (Machado de Assis), 439 Domecq, H. Bustos. See Bioy Casares, Adolfo; Borges, Jorge Luis Domingo siete (Poniatowska), 522 Dominican Americans. See Geographical Index under United States Dominican Republic. See Geographical Index Dominican theater, 744 Don Goyo (Aguilera Malta), 4-5, 788 Don Juan in New York City (Machado), 434 Don Quixote de la Mancha (Cervantes), 370, 768 Don Segundo Sombra (Güiraldes), 369-370, 781 Doña Bárbara (Gallegos), 318319, 781 Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (Amado), 52 Dona Flor e seus dois maridos. See Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands Donoso, José, 250-255, 776, 791

979

Subject Index Dôra Doralina (Queiroz), 534, 536 Dorfman, Ariel, 256-261 Dorfman, Vladimiro. See Dorfman, Ariel Dormir al sol. See Asleep in the Sun Doubtful Straight, The (Cardenal), 162 Down the Ravine. See Retrogression Down These Mean Streets (Thomas), 662-663, 846 Dragún, Osvaldo, 748 Dreaming in Cuban (García, Cristina), 329-330, 765 Drown (Díaz), 848 Drummond de Andrade, Carlos, 262-268 Duelo de caballeros (Alegría, Ciro), 18 Dueño de las estrellas, El (Ruiz de Alarcón), 596 Durante la reconquista (Blest Gana), 771 Duvalier, François “Papa Doc,” 750 Eagle and the Serpent, The (Guzmán), 374, 376, 779 Eagle or Sun? (Paz), 504 Echeverría, Esteban, 770 Ecuador. See Geographical Index ¡Ecué-Yamba-O! (Carpentier), 787 Edge of the Storm, The (Yáñez), 728, 730, 789 El Salvador. See Geographical Index Elements of San Joaquin, The (Soto), 646 Empress of the Splendid Season (Hijuelos), 392 En el teocalli de Cholula (Heredia), 378 En las calles (Icaza), 406

980

En Nueva York y otras desgracias (Gonzáles, José Luis), 763 En una tempestad (Heredia), 378 End of the Game, and Other Stories (Cortázar), 219 “Ending Poem” (Morales and Levins Morales), 811 Enterrado vivo (Andrés), 764 “Entry of Christ in Havana, The” (Sarduy), 639 Epic poetry, 858 Epitaph of a Small Winner (Machado de Assis), 439 Ercilla y Zúñiga, Alonso de, 816 Eroticism, 147, 184, 638 Escragnolle Tarmay, Alfredo de, 772 Escrito sobre un cuerpo. See Written on a Body Espada, Martín, 269-273, 811 España, aparta de mí este cáliz. See Spain, Take This Cup from Me España en el corazón. See Spain in the Heart Espesor del pellejo de un gato ya cadáver, El (González, Celedonio), 765 Esquivel, Laura, 274-279, 797 Esta noche juntos, amándonos tanto. See Together Tonight, Loving Each Other So Much Estampas del valle, y otras obras. See Sketches of the Valley, and Other Works Esteves, Sandra María, 806-807 Estrada Cabrera, Manuel, 86 Estrecho dudoso, El. See Doubtful Straight, The Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages (Puig), 529 Étranger, L’. See Stranger, The Eulogy for a Brown Angel. See Brown Eva Luna (Allende), 30

Subject Index Exiled writers; Ciro Alegría, 15; Claribel Alegría, 23; Isabel Allende, 27; Julia Alvarez, 41; Jorge Amado, 49; anthologies of, 803; Reinaldo Arenas, 69; Miguel Ángel Asturias, 88; Guillermo Cabrera Infante, 152; Alejo Carpentier, 167; Alejandro Casona, 175; Ariel Dorfman, 256; Eduardo Galeano, 312; Rómulo Gallegos, 320; Nicolás Guillén, 358; Martín Luis Guzmán, 376; José María Heredia, 381; Pablo Neruda, 477; Augusto Roa Bastos, 573; Virgil Suárez, 649; U.S. Latinos as, 831; César Vallejo, 689 Exiles, and Other Stories, The (Quiroga), 542 Existentialism, 788 Experiencia literaria, La (Reyes), 556 Explosion in a Cathedral (Carpentier), 169, 790 Expresión americana, La (Lezama Lima), 413 Exteriorismo, 160 “Eyes of Zapata” (Cisneros), 841 Eyes on the Harem (Fornes), 292 Fabiola (Machado), 435 Face of an Angel (Chávez), 197198 Faces and Masks (Galeano), 313314 Facundo (Sarmiento), 770, 860 Family, The (acting group), 509 Family Ties (Lispector), 428, 430 Fantasmas aztecas (Sainz), 614 Far Away and Long Ago (Hudson), 403 Farewell to the Sea (Arenas), 71

Farm Workers and Agri-Business in California, 1947-1960 (Galarza), 306 Faultline (Taylor), 654, 656 Feast of the Goat, The (Vargas Llosa), 698 Fefu and Her Friends (Fornes), 292 Felipe, Carlos, 751 Feminism, 147, 184, 203, 213, 227, 288, 291, 323, 465, 491, 514, 520, 533, 684, 797, 840 Fernández, Macedonio, 785 Fernández, Roberto, 847 Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín, 280-284, 769 Ferré, Rosario, 285-289, 823 Feuilleton, 529 Ficciones, 1935-1944 (Borges), 130, 132, 863 Fiel e a pedra, O (Lins), 417 Fiesta del Chivo. See Feast of the Goat, The Fiesta in November (Mallea), 446 Fifth Horseman, The (Villarreal), 708 Figueroa, José Angel, 806 Filloy, Juan, 785 Final Mist, The (Bombal), 121, 783 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 786 “First Dream” (Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la), 226 First Dream (Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la), 227, 816 Flamethrowers, The (Arlt), 76 Floating Island Plays, The (Machado), 435 Floating Islands. See Floating Island Plays, The Flor de durazno. See Peach Blossom Flor de juegos antiguos (Yáñez), 728

981

Subject Index “Flor de Lis,” La (Poniatowska), 524 Floricanto Sí! (anthology), 802 Fogo morto (Lins do Rego), 424 For a New Novel (Robbe-Grillet), 788 Foreign Girl, The (Sánchez, Florencio), 620, 745 Foreign Legion, The (Lispector), 428 Fornes, Maria Irene, 290-294, 435 Forteza, Horacio Quiroga y. See Quiroga, Horacio Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, The (Hijuelos), 390 Fourth Angel, The (Rechy), 549 Francia, José Gaspar Rodríguez, 743 Franco, Francisco, 3, 690, 734 Franco Years, The (Yglesias), 734 From Cuba with a Song (Sarduy), 638-639 FSLN. See Sandinista National Liberation Front Fuentes, Carlos, 81, 295-302, 769, 777, 790, 865 Fuerte es el silencio (Poniatowska), 521 Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta. See Splendor and Death of Joaquin Murieta “Funes the Memorious” (Borges), 131 Fusco, Coco, 755 Futile Life of Pito Pérez, The (Romero), 588, 591 Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (Amado), 50 Gabriela, cravo e canela. See Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon Gaitán, Jorge Eliécer, 340 Galarza, Ernesto, 303-308 982

Galeano, Eduardo, 309-315 Galich, Manuel, 751 Gallegos, Rómulo, 316-320, 781, 863 “Gallina degollada, La.” See “Decapitated Chicken, The” Gálvez, Manuel, 776 Gambaro, Griselda, 321-326, 749 Gamboa, Federico, 746, 773 Garabato Poems (Suárez), 653 García, Cristina, 327-332, 765 García, Lionel G., 333-337 García Lorca, Federico, 475 García Márquez, Gabriel, 276, 338-345, 697, 784, 794, 865 Gato eficaz, El (Valenzuela), 683 Gaucho Martin Fierro, The (Hernández), 384 Gauchos, 369, 382, 384, 781, 786 Gay authors; Reinaldo Arenas, 69, 797; Nicholas Dante, 243; Maria Irene Fornes, 292; José Lezama Lima, 413; Eduardo Machado, 436; Cristina Peri Rossi, 798; Manuel Puig, 529, 797; John Rechy, 545; Richard Rodriguez, 584; Severo Sarduy, 636; Sheila Ortiz Taylor, 654 Gazapo (Sainz), 612, 615, 796 Gelman, Juan, 823 Generation of 1940, 845 Generation of the 1950’s, 9 Genesis (Galeano), 313-314 Genio y figuras de Guadalajara (Yáñez), 728 Gesticulador, El (Usigli), 668, 746 Gestos (Sarduy), 638 Getting Home Alive (Morales and Levins Morales), 811 Giardinelli, Mempo, 796 Glory of Don Ramiro, La (Larreta), 777

Subject Index Golden Serpent, The (Alegría, Ciro), 15 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 755 Gomez Piñero, Miguel Antonio. See Piñero, Miguel Gómez de Avellaneda, Gerturdis, 381, 744, 771, 817 Góngora y Argote, Luis de, 227, 556 Gonzales, Rodolfo, 804 González, Celedonio, 765 González, Genaro, 839 González, José Luis, 763, 845 González Martínez, Enrique, 346-353 Goodbye Land, The (Yglesias), 733 Gorky, Maxim, 745 Gran señor y rajadiablos (Barrios), 111 Grande Sertão. See Devil to Pay in the Backlands, The Great Middle Class, The (Usigli), 670-671 Green House, The (Vargas Llosa), 697 Green Mansions (Hudson), 403 Gringa, La. See Foreign Girl, The Grito del Sol (magazine), 800 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of, 142, 758, 833 Guaracha del Macho Camacho, La. See Macho Camacho’s Beat Guatemala. See Geographical Index Guatemala (Galeano), 311 Guatimozín. See Cuauhtemoc, the Last Aztec Emperor Guayaquil Group, 4-5 Guerra del fin del mundo, La. See War of the End of the World, The Guerra del tiempo. See War of Time Guerra sem testemunhas (Lins), 417 Guillén, Nicolás, 354-360

Guimarães, Bernardo, 769 Guimarães Rosa, João, 361-367, 431, 795 Güiraldes, Ricardo, 74, 368-371, 781, 863 Gusmão, Alexandre de, 768 Gutiérrez, Jorge Díaz, 748 Gutierrez Nájera, Manuel, 818 Guzmán, Martín Luis, 372-377, 779 Habana para un infante difunto, La. See Infante’s Inferno Hallucinated City (Andrade), 64 Hallucinations (Arenas), 71 Halmar, Augusto d’, 777 Hammon and the Beans, and Other Stories, The (Paredes), 836 “Happy Birthday” (Lispector), 430 Hardscrub (García, Lionel G.), 335 Harford, Henry. See Hudson, W. H. Harvest, The (Rivera), 838 Hasta no verte, Jesús mío. See Here’s to You, Jesusa! Hay que sonreír. See Clara Healing Earthquakes (Baca), 104 Heart of Aztlán (Anaya), 59 Heartbreak Tango (Puig), 529-530 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 669 Heights of Macchu Picchu, The (Neruda), 476 Heraldos negros, Los. See Black Heralds, The Heredia, José María, 378-381, 817 Herencia (Kanellos), 813 Here’s to You, Jesusa! (Poniatowska), 522 Hermano asno, El. See Brother Ass

983

Subject Index Hernández, Antonio Acevedo, 745 Hernández, José, 382-386, 817 Hernández Cruz, Victor. See Cruz, Victor Hernández Hernandez del Castillo, Ana. See Castillo, Ana Herrera y Reissig, Julio, 351 Hija de la fortuna. See Daughter of Fortune Hijo de hombre. See Son of Man Hijo pródigo, El (magazine), 503 Hijuelos, Oscar, 387-393, 765 Hinojosa, Rolando, 394-399, 760 Hip-hop, 510 Hispanos, 836 Historia de Alejandro Mayta, La. See Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, The Historia de Él. See Story of Him, The “History of an Argentine Passion” (Mallea), 445 Hojarasca, La. See Leaf Storm Homage to the American Indians (Cardenal), 161 Hombres de maíz. See Men of Maize Homecoming (Alvarez), 45 Homenaje a los indios americanos. See Homage to the American Indians Hopscotch (Cortázar), 217, 221, 784, 792 Hora da estrela, A. See Hour of the Star, The Hostos, Eugenio María de, 786 Hour of the Star, The (Lispector), 429 House in the Country, A (Donoso), 251, 253 House of Mist, The. See Final Mist, The House of the Ravens, The (Wast), 725 984

House of the Spirits, The (Allende), 27, 31, 797 House on Mango Street, The (Cisneros), 200, 204, 761, 841 House on the Lagoon, The (Ferré), 286, 288 How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (Alvarez), 43-44 How to Read Donald Duck (Dorfman), 259 Hoyt Street (Ponce), 517 Huasipungo. See Villagers, The Hudson, W. H., 400-404 Huidobro, Vicente, 782, 820 Human Poems (Vallejo), 688-689 Humor as literary device; Guillermo Cabrera Infante, 152; Julio Cortázar, 222; Gabriel García Márquez, 344 Hunger of Memory (Rodriguez, Richard), 580, 582 I Am Joaquín (Gonzales), 804 “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!” (Valdez), 678 I Love Lucy, 391 I the Supreme (Roa Bastos), 168, 573 Ibañez, Sara de, 822 Ibarbourou, Juana de, 823 “Ibsen criollo, El” (nickname of Florencio Sánchez), 622 Icaza, Jorge, 405-408, 780 Identity as literary theme; Euclides da Cunha, 239; Cristina García, 329; José Lezama Lima, 414; Clarice Lispector, 429; Abraham Rodriguez, Jr., 577; Richard Rodriguez, 584; Luis Rafael Sánchez, 625; Victor Villaseñor, 714 Iguana Killer, The (Ríos), 559

Subject Index Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando, The. See Hallucinations Imaginary Parents (Taylor), 654 Imagine the Angels of Bread (Espada), 271 Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero, The (Espada), 270 Imperialism, 24, 259, 358, 455 Importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos, La (Sánchez, Luis Rafael), 627 Impure poetry, 821 “In Exile” (Sánchez, Ricardo), 805 In Nueva York (Mohr), 465 In the Eye of the Hurricane (Machado), 435 In the Fist of the Revolution (Yglesias), 734 In the Time of the Butterflies (Alvarez), 45 Independence movements in Latin America, 743 Independentista, 624 Indianism. See Indigenismo Indigenismo, 5, 16, 406, 779 Indigenous peoples, 5, 13, 64, 86, 178, 195, 405, 555, 687, 857 Indio, El (López y Fuentes), 779 Infante, Guillermo Cabrera. See Cabrera Infante, Guillermo Infante’s Inferno (Cabrera Infante), 153 Infinite Plan, The (Allende), 30 Information for Foreigners (Gambaro), 750 Inframundo (Rulfo), 600 Innocencia (Escragnolle Tarmay), 772 INTAR. See International Arts Relations

International Arts Relations (INTAR), 292 Invention of Morel, The (Bioy Casares), 118 Invitation, The (Castillo), 184 Isaacs, Jorge, 770, 775 Isla virgen, La (Aguilera Malta), 5 Island Like You, An (Ortiz Cofer), 847 Ismaelillo (Martí), 818 Isolation as literary theme; Julio Cortázar, 222; Nicanor Parra, 496; Miguel Piñero, 509; Ernesto Sábato, 609; Gary Soto, 644 Istarú, Ana, 823 Itching Parrot, The (Fernández de Lizardi), 281-282, 769 Japanese poetry, 504 Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, El (Borges), 130 Jarnés, Benjamín, 782 Javier, Francisco, 744 Jicoténcal (Heredia), 381 Jolson Tonight (Dante), 243 Journalists, 834 Journalists, authors as; Demetrio Aguilera Malta, 3; Ciro Alegría, 15; Isabel Allende, 29; Roberto Arlt, 77; Miguel Ángel Asturias, 88; Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, 136; Alejo Carpentier, 165; Jesús Colón, 208; Euclides da Cunha, 235; Carlos Drummond de Andrade, 265; José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, 281; Rosario Ferré, 285; Eduardo Galeano, 311; Cristina García, 327; Gabriel García Márquez, 340; Enrique González Martínez, 349; Nicolás Guillén, 355; Martín Luis 985

Subject Index Guzmán, 374; José Hernández, 385; Clarice Lispector, 427; Eduardo Mallea, 445; Juan Carlos Onetti, 481; Elena Poniatowska, 519; Augusto Roa Bastos, 571; Richard Rodriguez, 581; Luisa Valenzuela, 682; Mario Vargas Llosa, 695; Maruxa Vilalta, 701 Journals, literary, 800 Joyce, James, 786 Juan Criollo (Loveira), 774 Juntacadáveres. See Body Snatcher Jury (Villaseñor), 712 Kanellos, Nicolás, 801, 813 King Bongo (Sanchez, Thomas), 634 Kingdom of This World, The (Carpentier), 167, 789 Kirkwood, James, 243 Kiss of the Spider Woman (Puig), 529, 797 Klail City (Hinojosa), 397 Klail City Death Trip series (Hinojosa), 394, 397, 760 Korean Love Songs from Klail City Death Trip (Hinojosa), 394 Kropotkin, Pyotr, 745 Laberinto de la soledad, El. See Labyrinth of Solitude, The Labyrinth of Solitude, The (Paz), 503 Laços de família. See Family Ties Ladera este (Paz), 504 Lagar (Mistral), 461 Lanzallamas, Los (Arlt), 77 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 857 Last of the Menu Girls, The (Chávez), 197, 842 Latin American drama, 739 986

Latin American long fiction, 768 Latin American poetry, 816 Latin American short fiction, 850 Latin Deli, The (Ortiz Cofer), 491, 811 Latin Women Pray (Ortiz Cofer), 488 Latino (defined), 829 Latino literature (U.S.), history of, 833; drama, 739; long fiction, 758; poetry, 800; short fiction, 828 Law of Love, The (Esquivel), 278 Lázaro (Alegría, Ciro), 18 Leaf Storm (García Márquez), 340 Lean Lands, The (Yáñez), 729 Leaving Home (García, Lionel G.), 335-336 Legião estrangeira, A. See Foreign Legion, The Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 65 Levins Morales, Aurora, 811 Levinson, Luisa Mercedes, 863 Ley del amor, La. See Law of Love, The “Leyenda del sombrerón” (Asturias), 89 Leyendas de Guatemala (Asturias), 88, 787 Lezama Lima, José, 70, 409-415, 637, 793 Liar, The (Corneille), 597 Libro de Manuel. See Manual for Manuel, A Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens, The (Rechy), 550 Like Water for Chocolate (Esquivel), 274, 276, 797 Lilus Kikus (Poniatowska), 522 Lima, José Lezama. See Lezama Lima, José Line of the Sun, The (Ortiz Cofer), 491

Subject Index Lins, Osman, 416-420 Lins do Rego, José, 421-425 Lirismos (González Martínez), 349 Lispector, Clarice, 426-432, 795 “Listening to the Music of Arsenio Rodriguez Is Moving Closer to Knowledge” (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 231 Literary magazines, 800 “Little Miracles, Kept Promises” (Cisneros), 842 Living up the Street (Soto), 647 Lizardi, José Joaquín Fernández de. See Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín Lizárraga, Andrés, 748 Llano en llamas, El. See Burning Plain, and Other Stories, The Llerena, Cristóbal de, 742 Llorona, La, 839 Llosa, Mario Vargas. See Vargas Llosa, Mario Loose Woman (Cisneros), 203 López y Fuentes, Gregorio, 779 Los de abajo. See Underdogs, The Lost Steps, The (Carpentier), 167, 790 “Lost Year, The” (Rivera), 566 Love in the Time of Cholera (García Márquez), 342 Loveira, Carlos, 774 “Lower East Side Poem, A” (Piñero), 806 Loyola Brandão, Ignácio de. See Brandão, Ignácio de Loyola Luaces, Joaquín Lorenzo, 744 Lucía Miranda (Wast), 725 Lugones, Leopoldo, 351, 819 Lynch, B. Suárez. See Bioy Casares, Adolfo; Borges, Jorge Luis Lyrical novel, 428

Maçã no escuro, A. See Apple in the Dark, The Machado, Eduardo, 433-437 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, 365, 438-443, 774, 860 Machismo, 191, 214, 390, 465, 517, 531, 695, 712 Macho! (Villaseñor), 711, 714 Macho Camacho’s Beat (Sánchez, Luis Rafael), 625 Macunaíma (Andrade), 64, 66 Mad Toy (Arlt), 75 ¡Madrid! (Aguilera Malta), 5 Madrigal en ciudad (Gambaro), 322 Maestra normal, La (Gálvez), 776 Magazines (literary), 800 Magdaleno, Mauricio, 781 Magical Realism, 5, 31, 53, 71, 76, 81, 90, 277-278, 315, 329, 342-343, 470, 549, 559, 599, 715, 787, 831, 839, 853 Mainland (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 230 Maitreya (Sarduy), 640 Mala yerba. See Marcela Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas. See Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages Mallea, Eduardo, 444-449, 788 Malta, Demetrio Aguilera. See Aguilera Malta, Demetrio Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The (Hijuelos), 389, 391 Mangy Parrot, The. See Itching Parrot, The Manual for Manuel, A (Cortázar), 220 Manuela, la caballeresa del sol (Aguilera Malta), 5 Marcela (Azuela), 94 Marcha, 485 Marechal, Leopoldo, 785 María (Isaacs), 770, 775 987

Subject Index Mariátegui, José Carlos, 15 “Marlboro Man, The” (Cisneros), 842 Mármol, José, 770 Marqués, René, 752 Márquez, Gabriel García. See García Márquez, Gabriel Martí, José Julián, 352, 450-456, 743, 763, 818 Martín Rivas (Blest Gana), 772 Martínez, Dionisio D., 812 Martínez, Enrique González. See González Martínez, Enrique Martínez, Max, 840 Martínez, Rafael Arévalo, 777 Martínez Zuviría, Gustavo Adolfo. See Wast, Hugo Martirios del pueblo, Los (Bianchi), 744 “Marvelous reality,” 115, 169 Marxism in Cuban literature, 764 Massacre in Mexico (Poniatowska), 521 Massacre of the Dreamers (Castillo), 188 “Matadero, El” (Echeverría), 770 Matto de Turner, Clorinda, 771 Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen, A (Espada), 273 Medio tono. See Great Middle Class, The Mediodía, 358 Memoirs of Pancho Villa (Guzmán), 376 Memoria del fuego. See Memory of Fire Memoria del fuego I. See Genesis Memoria del fuego II. See Faces and Masks Memoria del fuego III. See Century of the Wind Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas. See Epitaph of a Small Winner 988

Memory of Fire (Galeano), 313314 Memory of Fire I. See Genesis Memory of Fire II. See Faces and Masks Memory of Fire III. See Century of the Wind Men of Maize (Asturias), 90, 787 Mendoza, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón y. See Ruiz de Alarcón, Juan Mendoza’s Dreams (Vega), 846 Menino de Engenho. See Plantation Boy Mentiroso, El. See Truth Suspected, The Mera, Juan León, 771 Mestizos, 743 Metafiction in work of José Donoso, 253 Metaphysics; in work of Eduardo Barrios, 113; in work of Jorge Luis Borges, 131; in work of Octavio Paz, 505 Mexican Americans. See Geographical Index under United States Mexican Revolution (19101920), 36, 95-96, 299, 303, 372, 374, 591, 600, 703, 707, 714, 730, 774, 778 Mexican theater, 746 Mexican-U.S. border, 107, 141, 213, 394, 558, 565 Mexican Village (Niggli), 835 Mexico. See Geographical Index Meza, Ramón, 775 M’hijo el dotor. See My Son, the Lawyer “Mi caballo mago” (Ullibarí), 839 “Mi Madre” (Mora), 810 “Miami 1980” (Clavijo), 809 “Midnight Mass” (Machado de Assis), 440

Subject Index Migration, 107, 210, 230, 306, 328, 335, 387, 490, 509, 565, 577, 633, 649, 714, 735 Mile Zero (Sanchez, Thomas), 632-633 Miracle plays, 741 Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez, The (Rechy), 549 Miranda, Javier. See Bioy Casares, Adolfo Misiones region (Argentina), 541 Mr. Ives’ Christmas (Hijuelos), 392 Mistral, Gabriela, 457-462, 473, 821 Mitío el empleado (Meza), 775 Mito, 678 Mixquiahuala Letters, The (Castillo), 186 Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa, The (Machado), 435 Modernism, 155, 245, 784; Brazilian, 63, 66, 263, 534 Modernismo, 351-352, 453, 573, 687, 773, 817, 862 Mohr, Nicholasa, 463-466, 763, 846 Monkey Hunting (García, Cristina), 330 Mora, Pat, 810 Morales, Alejandro, 467-471 Morales, Conrad. See Dante, Nicholas Morales, Rosario, 811 “More Room” (Ortiz Cofer), 491 Moros y cristianos plays, 742 Mothers and Shadows (Traba), 796 “Moths, The” (Viramontes), 843 Moths, and Other Stories, The (Viramontes), 718 Motivos de son (Guillén), 355-356 Mud (Fornes), 293

Muerte de Artemio Cruz, La. See Death of Artemio Cruz, The Muerte de Narciso (Lezama Lima), 410 Mujer del rio Sumpul, La. See Woman of the River Mummified Deer (Valdez), 678 Mundo alucinante, El. See Hallucinations Mundo es ancho y ajeno, El. See Broad and Alien Is the World Mundonovismo, 778 Murillo, Rosario, 823 Music in Cuba (Carpentier), 167 Music of the Spheres, The (Cardenal), 161-162 Música sentimental (Cambacérès), 773 My Son, the Lawyer (Sánchez, Florencio), 620 My Wicked, Wicked Ways (Cisneros), 202 Myriam la conspiradora (Wast), 725 Myth in work of Rodolfo Usigli, 669 Nacimientos, Los. See Genesis Nada como el piso 16. See Nothing Like the Sixteenth Floor Nada, nadie. See Nothing, Nobody Nada que ver (Gambaro), 323 Nada que ver con otra historia (Gambaro), 323 Não verás país nenhum. See And Still the Earth Nationalism (Latin America), 858 Native Americans. See Geographical Index under United States Naturalism, 95, 238, 318, 403, 621, 746, 773

989

Subject Index Naturalist in La Plata, The (Hudson), 403 Navidad en las Montañas, La. See Christmas in the Mountains Near to the Wild Heart (Lispector), 427 Negrista approach, 356 Neoclassicism; Latin American, 817 Neologisms, 155, 358, 366, 687 Neruda, Pablo, 121, 458, 472479, 747, 821 New Age movement, 182 New Cinema movement, 239 New Mexico Triptych (Chávez, Fray Angélico), 835 New Novel, 5, 118, 542, 638, 693, 789, 791. See also Nouveau roman New Voices of Hispanic America (Alegría, Claribel), 23 New York City, 208, 465, 575 New York 1937 (Yglesias), 736 Newspapers, 834 Next Year in Cuba (Pérez Firmat), 812 Nicaragua. See Geographical Index Nicaraguan Revolution (1979), 23. See also Somoza family Niggli, Josefina, 835 Nilda (Mohr), 465 9, El. See Number 9 Nine, Novena (Lins), 417 1910 (Vilalta), 703 Niño que enloqueció de amor, El (Barrios), 111 No Man’s Land (Onetti), 482 Nobel Prize winners; Miguel Ángel Asturias, 91; Gabriel García Márquez, 342; Gabriela Mistral, 457; Octavio Paz, 506

990

Noche de Tlatelolco, La. See Massacre in Mexico Noches tristes y día alegre (Fernández de Lizardi), 281 Nocturno europeo (Mallea), 445 Nonfiction novel, 236 Nonfiction writers. See Genre Index Nosotros somos dios (Cantón), 747 Notes of a Villager (Romero), 590 Nothing Like the Sixteenth Floor (Vilalta), 701 Nothing, Nobody (Poniatowska), 522 Nouveau roman. See New Novel Nove, novena. See Nine, Novena “Novel of the land,” 318 Novela negra, 796 Novela que comienza, Una (Fernández), 785 Novelists. See Genre Index Nuestra Natacha (Casona), 175 Nuevo mar para el rey, Un (Aguilera Malta), 5 Number 9 (Vilalta), 701 Numbers (Rechy), 547 Nuyorican culture, 464, 508, 575, 663 Nuyorican poetry, 802, 806 Nuyorican Poetry (Algarín and Piñero), 806 Nuyorican Poets Café, 509 Nuyoricans, 845 Obscene Bird of Night, The (Donoso), 251, 792 Obsceno pájaro de la noche, El. See Obscene Bird of Night, The Obsesivos días circulares (Sainz), 614 Of Love and Other Demons (García Márquez), 342 Of Love and Shadows (Allende), 30

Subject Index Old Faces and New Wine (Morales), 467 Olympic Games massacre, 1968, 505, 521 On Heroes and Tombs (Sábato), 608, 789 “On the Temple Pyramid of Cholula” (Heredia), 380 Oña, Pedro de, 780 Onda, La, 612 One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Márquez), 31, 339, 343, 784, 794 O’Neill, Eugene, 753 Onetti, Juan Carlos, 480-486, 789 Only Sons (González, Genaro), 839 Op Oloop (Filloy), 785 Open Veins of Latin America, The (Galeano), 312 Orígenes (journal), 412, 636 Orrego Luco, Luis, 776 Ortiz, Judith. See Ortiz Cofer, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Judith, 487-493, 811, 847 Ortiz Taylor, Sheila. See Taylor, Sheila Ortiz “Other Weapons” (Valenzuela), 684 Otoño del patriarca, El. See Autumn of the Patriarch, The Otra vez el mar. See Farewell to the Sea Otro Canto (Castillo), 184 Our House in the Last World (Hijuelos), 387, 765 Our Lady of Babylon (Rechy), 549 Outsider, The (Sábato), 608-609 Oxford Book of Women’s Writing in the United States, The (Viramontes), 717

Paixão segundo G. H., A. See Passion According to G. H., The Palabras cruzadas (Poniatowska), 519 Palace of the White Skunks, The (Arenas), 70 Palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas, El. See Palace of the White Skunks, The Paloma de vuelo popular, La (Guillén), 358 Pantaleón y las visitadoras. See Captain Pantoja and the Special Service Papo Got His Gun! and Other Poems (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 230 Para leer al Pato Donald. See How to Read Donald Duck Paradiso (Lezama Lima), 410, 412, 793 Paraguay. See Geographical Index Paredes, Américo, 836 Parnassian school, 246, 352, 773 Parra, Nicanor, 494-498, 822 Pasión según Antígona Pérez, La. See Passion According to Antígona Pérez, The Pasos perdidos, Los. See Lost Steps, The Passion According to Antígona Pérez, The (Sánchez, Luis Rafael), 625 Passion According to G. H., The (Lispector), 428 Passion plays, 741 Pata de zorra (Wast), 726 Paula (Allende), 32 Paulicéia desvairada. See Hallucinated City Pavlovsky, Eduardo, 750 Paz, Octavio, 499-507, 821 Peach Blossom (Wast), 724 991

Subject Index Pedro Páramo (Rulfo), 600, 602, 779, 790 Pensador Mexicano, El. See Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín Pentagonía, The. See Farewell to the Sea; Palace of the White Skunks, The; Singing from the Well Pereira, Nuno Marques, 768 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 812 Pérgola de las flores, La (Aguirre), 8, 10 Peri Rossi, Cristina, 798 Periquillo sarniento, El. See Itching Parrot, The Perros hambrientos, Los (Alegría, Ciro), 16 Perto do coração selvagem. See Near to the Wild Heart Peru. See Geographical Index Peruvian Americans. See Geographical Index under United States Peter Pan Project, 433 Petraglia, Jorge, 323 Picaresque novels, 769, 775 Piedra de sol. See Sun Stone “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (Borges), 131 Pietri, Pedro, 806-807 Pig Cookies, and Other Stories (Ríos), 559 Pimenta da Cunha, Euclides Rodrigues. See Cunha, Euclides da Piñero, Miguel, 508-513, 806 Pinochet Ugarte, Augusto, 254, 259, 342 Pit, The (Onetti), 481 Pizarnik, Alejandra, 823 Plan infinito, El. See Infinite Plan, The Plantation Boy (Lins do Rego), 422-423 992

Plum Plum Pickers, The (Barrio), 107-108, 759 Población esperanza, La (Aguirre), 9 Pocho (Villarreal), 706, 708, 759 Poe, Edgar Allan, 219, 538, 853 Poemas humanos. See Human Poems Poemas y antipoemas. See Poems and Antipoems Poems and Antipoems (Parra), 496497 Poets. See Genre Index Political drama, 747 Political prisoners, authors as; Ciro Alegría, 15; Reinaldo Arenas, 69; Guillermo Cabrera Infante, 151; Alejo Carpentier, 167; José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, 281; Martín Luis Guzmán, 375; José Martí, 452; Juan Carlos Onetti, 485; César Vallejo, 687 Politicians, authors as; Ciro Alegría, 18; Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, 37; Jorge Amado, 49; Mariano Azuela, 95; Rómulo Gallegos, 318; Ricardo Güiraldes, 369; Martín Luis Guzmán, 375; Mario Vargas Llosa, 698 Pompéia, Raúl, 774 Ponce, Mary Helen, 514-518 Poniatowska, Elena, 519-525 Popol Vuh (Asturias), 787 Portrait in Sepia (Allende), 32 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce), 708, 712 Portrait sépia. See Portrait in Sepia Portuguese Americans. See Geographical Index under United States Position of America, The (Reyes), 555

Subject Index Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, The. See Epitaph of a Small Winner Postmodernism, 313, 351, 614, 819 Pozo, El. See Pit, The “Preciousness” (Lispector), 430 Pre-Columbian theater, 739 Preludios (González Martínez), 349 Premios, Los. See Winners, The Presentes, Los, 80 President, The (Asturias), 88, 789 Primeiras estórias. See Third Bank of the River, and Other Stories, The Primero sueño. See First Dream Primitivism, 785 Primos, Los (González, Celedonio), 765 Princesa del palacio de hierro, La. See Princess of the Iron Palace, The Princess of the Iron Palace, The (Sainz), 614 “Prodigious Milligram, The” (Arreola), 82 Professors, authors as; Raymond Barrio, 106; Lorna Dee Cervantes, 193; Denise Chávez, 196; Ariel Dorfman, 260; Martín Espada, 270; Rosario Ferré, 286; Lionel G. García, 334; Enrique González Martínez, 347; Rolando Hinojosa, 396; Eduardo Machado, 436; Alejandro Morales, 467; Judith Ortiz Cofer, 490; Nicanor Parra, 497; Octavio Paz, 506; Alberto Ríos, 558; Gary Soto, 646; Sheila Ortiz Taylor, 657

Prosas profanas, and Other Poems (Darío), 247 Psalms of Struggle and Liberation, The (Cardenal), 161 Psychological novel, 112 Psychological realism, 774 Pueblo inocente, El (Romero), 591 Puerto Rican fiction, 761 Puerto Rican in New York, A (Colón), 209 Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, 147 Puerto Rican Obituary (Pietri), 807 Puerto Rican poetry, 802 Puerto Rican short fiction, 845 Puerto Rican theater, 743 Puerto Ricans. See Geographical Index under United States Puig, Manuel, 526-532, 794, 797 Pulitzer Prize winners; Nicholas Dante, 243; Oscar Hijuelos, 390 Purén indómito (Álvarez de Toledo), 858 Purple Land, The (Hudson), 401402 “Purpose of Altar Boys, The” (Ríos), 561 Queen of the Prisons of Greece, The (Lins), 418 Queiroz, Rachel de, 533-537 Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela. See Dear Diego Quetzal dance, 740 Quevado y Villegas, Francisco Gómez de, 227 Quijote de El Dorado, El (Aguilera Malta), 5 Quintuplets (Sánchez, Luis Rafael), 624, 626 Quinze, O (Queiroz), 535 Quiroga, Horacio, 538-544, 862 993

Subject Index Rabasa, Emilio, 773 Rabbit Boss (Sanchez, Thomas), 631 Race, 441 Racism, 147, 193, 357, 389, 465, 469, 492, 659, 714 Rag Doll Plagues, The (Morales), 468-469 Rain of Gold (Villaseñor), 713 Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings (Trambley), 840 Rainha dos cárceres da Grécia, A. See Queen of the Prisons of Greece, The Ramón Jiménez, Juan, 410 Ramos, Graciliano, 784 Ramos, José Antonio, 745 Rayuela. See Hopscotch Raza de bronce (Arguedas), 780 Reaching for the Mainland (Ortiz Cofer), 488 Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, The (Vargas Llosa), 698 Realism, 441, 622, 787 Reasons of State (Carpentier), 168, 793 Rebelión es el giro de manos del amante. See Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands Rebellion in the Backlands (Cunha), 236, 774 Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Espada), 271 Recapitulation system (influence on Carlos Castaneda), 179 Rechy, John, 545-551 Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project, 801, 813 Recuerdo (Ponce), 515 Recurso del método, El. See Reasons of State Red Beans (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 232 994

Redondillas, 816 Región más transparente, La. See Where the Air Is Clear Regionalism, 423, 778 Rego, José Lins do. See Lins do Rego, José Reino de este mundo, El. See Kingdom of This World, The Related Retreats (Machado), 434 Renacimiento, El, 37 Renaissance; Latin America, 816 Requena, María Asunción, 747 Residence on Earth, and Other Poems (Neruda), 475 Residencia en la tierra. See Residence on Earth, and Other Poems “Residue” (Drummond de Andrade), 266 Respuesta de la poetisa a la muy ilustre Sor Filotea de la Cruz (Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la), 227 Retablos, 831 Retrogression (Sánchez, Florencio), 621, 745 Revista Chicano-Riqueña (journal), 184, 232, 568, 801, 828 Revista de América, 247 Revolución cubana, La (Alegría, Ciro), 18 Reyes, Alfonso, 552-557 Reyles, Carlos, 777 Rhythm, Content, & Flavor (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 232 Ríos, Alberto, 558-563 “River, The” (Soto), 645 Rivera, José Eustacio, 781 Rivera, Tomás, 396, 564-569, 830, 838 Roa Bastos, Augusto, 570-574, 793 Road to Tamazunchale, The (Arias), 761

Subject Index Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 788 Rodó, José Enrique, 775 Rodrigues Pimenta da Cunha, Euclides. See Cunha, Euclides da Rodriguez, Abraham, Jr., 575579, 847 Rodriguez, Richard, 580-586 Rojas, Manuel, 783 Roman Catholic Church as a Factor in the Political and Social History of Mexico, The (Galarza), 305 Romantic realism, 772 Romanticism, 281, 378, 744, 768; Latin American, 817 Romero, Alberto, 809 Romero, Archbishop Oscar, 23 Romero, José Rubén, 587-592 Rosa, João Guimarães. See Guimarães Rosa, João Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 744, 770 Rosenda (Romero), 591 Ruiz de Alarcón, Juan, 593-598 Rulfo, Juan, 81, 599-605, 779 Sab (Gómez de Avellaneda), 771 Sábato, Ernesto, 606-611, 789 Sacasa, Juan Bautista, 21 Sacastra, Martin. See Bioy Casares, Adolfo Sacred Families (Donoso), 251 Sagarana (Guimarães Rosa), 362 Sainete criollo, 752 Sainetes, 743 Sainz, Gustavo, 81, 612-617, 796 Salmos. See Psalms of Struggle and Liberation, The Sánchez, Florencio, 618-622, 745 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 623-628 Sánchez, Ricardo, 804 Sanchez, Thomas, 629-635

Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), 160. See also Somoza family Sangre de amor correspondido. See Blood of Requited Love Sangre patricia (Díaz Rodríguez), 777 Santa (Gamboa), 773 Santa Juana de América (Lizárraga), 749 Santiago Baca, Jimmy. See Baca, Jimmy Santiago Sapogonia (Castillo), 187 Sarduy, Severo, 636-641, 793 Sarita (Fornes), 293 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 770, 860 Sarmiento, Félix Rubén García. See Darío, Rubén Science fiction, 115, 278 “Search for Poetry” (Drummond de Andrade), 266 Senderos ocultos, Los (González Martínez), 349 Señor Presidente, El. See President, The Separate Reality, A (Castaneda), 179 Serpiente de oro, La. See Golden Serpent, The Sertões, Os. See Rebellion in the Backlands Seven Madmen, The (Arlt), 76-77, 783 Seven Serpents and Seven Moons (Aguilera Malta), 5, 788 Sexual Outlaw, The (Rechy), 549 Ship of Fools, The (Peri Rossi), 797 Shipyard, The (Onetti), 483 Short Eyes (Piñero), 508, 511 Short-story writers. See Genre Index Shroud in the Family, A (García, Lionel G.), 335 995

Subject Index Shrouded Woman, The (Bombal), 122 Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, The (Valdez), 674 Siamese Twins, The (Gambaro), 324 Siameses, Los. See Siamese Twins, The Siete locos, Los. See Seven Madmen, The Siete lunas y siete serpientes. See Seven Serpents and Seven Moons Sievking, Alejandro, 748 Siglo de las luces, El. See Explosion in a Cathedral Silence of the Llano, The (Anaya), 839 Silent Dancing (Ortiz Cofer), 490491 Silva, José Asunción, 352, 775 Silva e Orta, Teresa Margarida da, 768 “Silvery Night, A” (Rivera), 566 Simple Habana Melody, A (Hijuelos), 392 Simple Verses (Martí), 452, 455 Singing from the Well (Arenas), 71 Sirena varada, La (Casona), 173 62: A Model Kit (Cortázar), 220 Skármeta, Antonio, 796 Sketches of the Valley, and Other Works (Hinojosa), 396 Slavery; influence on Nicolás Guillén, 357; influence on José Lins do Rego, 422; influence on José Martí, 451 Small Faces (Soto), 646 Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, The (Ríos), 562 Snaps (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 230 So Far from God (Castillo), 186, 188

996

Sobre héroes y tumbas. See On Heroes and Tombs Sobre la misma tierra (Gallegos), 318 Social realism, 406 Sol, Al. See Al sol Soldiers, authors as; Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, 37; Rolando Hinojosa, 395; Augusto Roa Bastos, 571 Solentiname, 159 Sombra del caudillo, La (Guzmán), 376, 779 Somoza family, 159 Son of Man (Roa Bastos), 571572, 793 “Son-Sequence” (Pérez Firmat), 812 Sóngoro cosongo (Guillén), 357 Sontag, Susan, 292 Soto, Gary, 642-648, 810 Soto, Pedro Juan, 762, 845 South American Jungle Tales (Quiroga), 542 Southwestern United States, 99, 103, 178, 180, 195, 198, 335, 559 Spain; influence on Rubén Darío, 248; influence on Eduardo Galeano, 312; influence on Pablo Neruda, 475; influence on Octavio Paz, 503; influence on Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, 596; influence on César Vallejo, 690; influence on Jose Yglesias, 734 Spain in the Heart (Neruda), 475 Spain, Take This Cup from Me (Vallejo), 688, 690 Spanglish, 109, 193, 202, 232, 389, 469, 514, 560, 650, 831. See also Bilingualism; Codeswitching

Subject Index Spanish Americans. See Geographical Index under United States Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), 3, 475, 503, 689, 734. See also Spain Spanish conquest, 740 Spiders in the House and Workers in the Field (Galarza), 306 Spidertown (Rodriguez, Abraham, Jr.), 577 Spiks (Soto, Pedro Juan), 762, 845 Splendor and Death of Joaquin Murieta (Neruda), 747 Spring Forward/Fall Back (Taylor), 657 Stevie Wants to Play the Blues (Machado), 434 Stories from El Barrio (Thomas), 846 Storni, Alfonsina, 819 Story of Him, The (Vilalta), 701 Stranger, The (Camus), 447 Strangers in Our Fields (Galarza), 306 Stroessner, Alfredo, 573 Suárez, Mario, 835 Suárez, Virgil, 649-653, 847 Subterrâneos da liberdade, Os (Amado), 50 Sultry Moon (Giardinelli), 796 Sumiço da santa, O. See War of the Saints, The Summer Life, A (Soto), 645 Sun Stone (Paz), 503 Sunburst (Magdaleno), 781 Suor (Amado), 49 Suprema ley (Gamboa), 773 Sur (magazine), 121 Surrealist movement, 88, 478, 494, 496, 503, 783, 785 Swift as Desire (Esquivel), 278 “Switchman, The” (Arreola), 81

Symbolist movement, 130, 246, 352, 410, 777 Tacámbaro (Romero), 590 Tacón, Miguel de, 743 Taking Control (Ponce), 515 Tala (Mistral), 460 Tale of Sunlight, The (Soto), 647 “Tales Told Under the Mango Tree” (Ortiz Cofer), 491 Taller (magazine), 503 Taller generation, 821 Tan veloz como el deseo. See Swift as Desire Tapia y Rivera, Alejandro, 744 Taylor, Sheila Ortiz, 654-658 Ta$ziyeh plays, 740 Teachings of Don Juan, The (Castaneda), 178, 180 Teatro bufo, 744 Teatro Campesino, El, 674, 755 Teatro de la Esperanza, 755 Teatro Nacional de Aztlán, 755 Teatro Orientación, 667 Tel Quel group, 636, 682 Telenovelas, 186 Tembladera (Ramos), 745 “Tensegrity,” 181 “Tenth Muse,” 227 Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses (Ríos), 559 Terms of Survival (Ortiz Cofer), 490 Ternura (Mistral), 458 Terra nostra (Fuentes), 298, 300, 777, 790 Texas Rangers, 142 Theater of Cruelty, 749 Theater of the Absurd, 749 Theatre of Revolt, 747 Theatre of the Oppressed, The (Boal), 754 “Thin Edge of Happiness, The” (Guimarães Rosa), 364 997

Subject Index Third Bank of the River, and Other Stories, The (Guimarães Rosa), 363 This Day’s Death (Rechy), 549 Thomas, Piri, 659-665, 846 “Three Marias,” 187 Three Marias, The (Queiroz), 536 Three Trapped Tigers (Cabrera Infante), 152, 154, 792 Tía Julia y el escribidor, La. See Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter Tierra Amarilla (Ulibarrí), 839 Tierra de nadie. See No Man’s Land Tierra prodiga, La (Yáñez), 729 Tierras flacas, Las. See Lean Lands, The Tiêta do Agreste. See Tieta, the Goat Girl Tieta, the Goat Girl (Amado), 52 Time of the Hero, The (Vargas Llosa), 695-696 “To Julia de Burgos” (Burgos), 148 “To Roosevelt” (Darío), 248 Todo empezo el domingo (Poniatowska), 520 Todo verdor perecerá. See All Green Shall Perish Together Tonight, Loving Each Other So Much (Vilalta), 701 Tonight. See No Man’s Land Tony Award winners; Nicholas Dante, 243 “Tony Went to the Bodega but He Didn’t Buy Anything” (Espada), 272 Tortuga (Anaya), 59 Traba, Marta, 796 Tragedy at Chular (Galarza), 307 Traición de Rita Hayworth, La. See Betrayed by Rita Hayworth Trambley, Estela Portillo, 840 “Tree, The” (Bombal), 123-124 998

Três Marias, As. See Three Marias, The Tres novelitas burguesas. See Sacred Families Tres tristes tigres. See Three Trapped Tigers Trials of a Respectable Family, The (Azuela), 96 Triana, José, 751 Tribulaciones de una familia decente, Las. See Trials of a Respectable Family, The Trilce (Vallejo), 687 Tropicalization (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 232 Trujillo Molina, Rafael Leonidas, 41, 750 Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction (Espada), 270 Truth About Them, The (Yglesias), 735 Truth Suspected, The (Ruiz de Alarcón), 597 Túnel, El. See Outsider, The Tungsten (Vallejo), 780 Tunnel, The. See Outsider, The Tupac Amaru (Dragún), 748 Tupamaros, 484 Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Neruda), 475-476 Ulibarrí, Sabine Reyes, 839 Última niebla, La. See Final Mist, The Ultraism, 130, 820 Under the Feet of Jesus (Viramontes), 719-720 Underdogs, The (Azuela), 93, 376, 778 United States. See Geographical Index Uno y el universo (Sábato), 608 Uruguay. See Geographical Index

Subject Index Usigli, Rodolfo, 666, 668-672, 746 Valdés Domínguez, Fermín, 452 Valdez, Luis Miguel, 673-680, 755 Valenzuela, Luisa, 681-685 Valle negro. See Black Valley Vallejo, César, 13, 686-691, 780, 821 Vanguard poets; Latin America, 819 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 692-699, 794, 865 Varia invención. See Various Inventions Various Inventions (Arreola), 80 Varona, Dora, 18 Vasconcelos, José, 786 Vásquez, Richard, 759 Vega, Ed, 846 Vega Carpio, Lope de, 227 Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada. See Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair Vela, Arqueles, 783 Venas abiertas de América Latina, Las. See Open Veins of Latin America, The Vendidos, Los (Valdez), 675 Venezuela. See Geographical Index Verdad sospechosa, La. See Truth Suspected, The Versos de salón (Parra), 496 Versos libres (Martí), 455 Versos sencillos. See Simple Verses Vida breve, La. See Brief Life, A Vida inútil de Pito Pérez, La. See Futile Life of Pito Pérez, The Vigil, Evangelina, 801 Vilalta, Maruxa, 700-705, 752 Villa, Pancho, 375

Villagers, The (Icaza), 406, 780 Villarreal, José Antonio, 706-710, 759 Villaseñor, Victor, 711-716 Villaverde, Cirilo, 770 Viramontes, Helena María, 717722, 843 Vision of Anáhuac (Reyes), 555556 Visitante, O (Lins), 416 Vivir (Barrios), 111 Vortex, The (Rivera, José Eustacio), 781 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 324 Wake in Ybor City, A (Yglesias), 733, 735 Walking Stars (Villaseñor), 716 War of the End of the World, The (Vargas Llosa), 239 War of the Saints, The (Amado), 53 War of Time (Carpentier), 169, 864 Wast, Hugo, 723-726 “Waxen Woman” (Sarduy), 638 Wedding, The (Ponce), 516-517 “Welcome, Bob” (Onetti), 484 West Indies, Ltd. (Guillén), 357 Where Sparrows Work Hard (Soto), 647 Where the Air Is Clear (Fuentes), 299, 790 Whispering to Fool the Wind (Ríos), 558 Wild Steps of Heaven (Villaseñor), 715 Williams, Tennessee, 753 Winners, The (Cortázar), 219 Wolff, Egon Raúl, 747 “Woman Hollering Creek” (Cisneros), 842 Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories (Cisneros), 203, 841 999

Subject Index Woman of Her Word (Vigil), 801 Woman of the River (Alegría, Claribel), 24 “Wring the Swan’s Neck” (González Martínez), 351 Writes of Passage (Cabrera Infante), 152 Written on a Body (Sarduy), 638 Xipe Totec ritual, 740 . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra. See . . . and the earth did not part Yáñez, Agustín, 727-731 Yañez, José Donoso. See Donoso, José Yawar fiesta (Arguedas), 788

1000

Ybor City, 733 Yglesias, Jose, 732-736 Yo, el Supremo. See I the Supreme “Youngest Doll, The” (Ferré), 288 Zapata Olivella, Manuel, 798 Zarco, the Bandit, El (Altamirano), 36-37, 772 Zero (Brandão), 136, 138 Zia Summer (Anaya), 59 Zola, Émile, 772 Zona de carga y descarga (Ferré), 286 Zoot Suit (Valdez), 676-677 Zoot Suit Murders (Sanchez, Thomas), 632

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